VerSe Innovation is struggling to keep its Josh going.

After bagging $805 Mn in 2022 — the biggest cheque that year — and raising nearly $1.5 Bn in its lifetime, the Josh and Dailyhunt parent company is still stuck on the one question that most startups go through even one day one i.e. monetisation.

The revenue challenge is particularly hard on Josh, VerSe’s short video app that had all the momentum on its side just two years ago. The startup raised the money and acquired users to take short video platform Josh to the top of the pile of Indian short video apps over the past few years.

But Josh is now yet another example of an Indian short video app falling short of the mark.

The optimism around short video apps, which boomed in 2021 and fizzled out soon after, has proven to be misplaced. We have seen the situation at Sharechat’s Moj, Trell, Roposo, Mitron, Chingari and half a dozen other short video apps, all of which faced massive monetisation challenges.

But Verse was bullish about Josh even through this downturn. In February 2023, VerSe’s cofounder Umang Bedi said the company is aiming to take Josh to the public markets in the next few quarters saying that the platform has started making money.

However, Inc42 learnt from sources that Josh has considerably scaled down its operations, letting go of 50-70 employees in the last two months even as monetisation continues to pose a challenge.

While VerSe Innovation did not respond to our questions, sources close to management said these were a part of a routine performance review, with various employees asked to put down their papers.

As per sources, the layoffs impacted senior employees who were drawing higher salaries than others. We were also told that team leaders often spoke about VerSe’s soaring losses, as a result of various initiatives that were shunted.

“However, amidst this restructuring the company continued to hire freshers and others at junior positions,” one source told us.

The retrenchments occurred after VerSe announced the acquisition of US-based magazine subscription platform Magzter in April 2024, as it looked to strengthen the content delivery business of Dailyhunt and One India. But none of these verticals are profitable, and therein lies the big problem for VerSe.

Josh, which requires the most marketing dollars, is the heaviest weight around the company’s shoulders.

In FY23, VerSe Innovation managed to cut its losses by 25% to INR 1,909 Cr from INR........

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