Earlier this year, Google committed a corpus of $10 billion for driving digital growth in India, of which a large portion went to Reliance Jio. Of the remaining fund, the search giant has now started investing in its own ambitious projects and various other local startups that align with its vision of digital inclusion. The services to get Google's backing include two major local news ports, Glance and Dailyhunt, alongside their sister short-video services.

India’s unicorn startup Glance, which is known for filling up your lock screen with personalized news, picked up an investment of $145 million in a round led by Google. As part of this infusion, Google is also investing in its sister app Roposo (both owned by InMobi), which was among the handful of Indian apps that rose in popularity after the much-talked-about TikTok ban in the country. Following this new financing round, Glance is reportedly planning to expand to the US.

Dailyhunt is another well-known news portal with over 300 million users that recently secured a total of $100 million from an investor group with Google and Microsoft in the lead. This fund infusion goes to Dailyhunt’s parent firm VerSe Innovation, which also happens to own Josh, another TikTok-like short video app that became popular in recent times. Officials at VerSe want to expand Josh’s scope to include more local language content and develop an ecosystem for content creators.

Google refrained from sharing any further or more precise details about these investments, but considering it’s leading both these rounds, Google’s portion surely makes up a big chunk of these totals. It wasn’t immediately clear how exactly these investments will bring any change to Google’s own news offerings, if at all.

Source: Google India

Via: TechCrunch