India registers a record of 11 unicorns in pandemic year: Times of India

BENGALURU: India has seen a record quantity of unicorns (startups valued at $1 billion or extra) being created in 2020. On Tuesday, two corporations Glance and Dailyhunt turned unicorns, taking the year’s complete to 11. In 2019, 9 ventures turned unicorns, and in the year earlier than, it was eight.

The year started on a cautionary be aware, with marquee enterprise capital agency Sequoia Capital warning of the likelihood of a ‘black swan’ like occasion as a result of pandemic. But the massive quantities of cash that central banks globally have been releasing to revive their economies have ensured the other.

InMobi Group’s Glance, which offers dynamic content material on the lock screens of Android telephones, on Tuesday introduced it has raised $145 million from Google and current investor Mithril Capital, an funding fund of Peter Thiel, who co-based PayPal and Palantir Technologies.

A supply near the corporate informed TOI that the funding values Glance at over $1 billion. This additionally places Naveen Tewari, who based InMobi in 2007 and Glance in 2019, among the many few who’ve created multiple unicorn. InMobi, a cell promoting platform, turned a unicorn when SoftBank invested $200 million in the corporate in 2011.

Dailyhunt, a native language-based mostly information and content material platform, on Tuesday stated it has raised $100 million in new capital from Microsoft, Google, Falcon Edge’s funding unit Alpha Wave, and different buyers, at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Mohan Kumar, founder and managing accomplice at software program-targeted Avatar Ventures, stated corporations which have managed to seize the constructive aspect of the pandemic have seen good investor curiosity and raised capital at a excessive valuation.

“Companies that are enabling digitisation of business operations and have captured (market) and grown this year are the ones which investors are pleasantly surprised by, and they are rewarding those companies,” stated Kumar.

“Glance is on a tear,” Tewari informed TOI. “We own the lock screen content place, just as Facebook, WhatsApp and others own their spaces. There’s no one in the rear-view mirror for us.”

Dailyhunt’s father or mother agency Verse Innovation stated it is going to use the brand new capital to scale up its just lately launched brief-video app Josh, implement AI and ML options, and develop its content material creator ecosystem. It competes with platforms like MX Takatak, and Instagram Reels. MX Takatak is owned by Times Internet, an arm of BCCL, which publishes this newspaper.