Dailyhunt and Josh parent VerSe lays off 150 staff, announces company-wide pay cuts

VerSe Innovation, the parent company of news aggregator Dailyhunt and short video platform Josh, has announced pay cuts and layoffs, people aware of the development said, as startups grapple with a drought in funding.

The company, which had raised $805 million at a valuation of $5 billion, has cut salaries up to 11 percent for employees earning more than Rs 10 lakh per annum, the people said, requesting anonymity. The company has also laid off about 150 employees or about 5 percent of its workforce.

These measures were unveiled In a town hall meeting, addressed by the company’s co-founders Virendra Gupta and Umang Bedi. They told employees that the next year will be tough and these measures will help make the company more sustainable.

Bedi confirmed the development and said, “given the current economic climate, like other businesses, we’ve evaluated our strategic priorities. Considering the long-term viability of the business and our people, we have taken steps to implement our regular bi-annual performance management cycle and made performance & business considerations to streamline our costs and our teams. This has impacted 5% of our 3,000-strong workforce.”

According to a media report by Entrackr, VerSe Innovation reported a whopping loss of Rs 2,563 crore in FY22 (2021-22), which widened from Rs 808 crore in FY21 (2020-21). The company’s operating revenue, however, grew 46 percent to Rs 965 crore from Rs 666 crore, the Entrackr report showed.

The report further said that VerSe Innovation invested heavily for growth in ‘Josh', a platform that competes with Meta’s Instagram Reels, Google’s YouTube Shorts, and ShareChat’s short video platform Takatak.

VerSe Innovation, which was earlier backed by ByteDance, the parent company of the world’s biggest short video platform TikTok, was founded by Virendra Gupta and Shailendra Sharma in 2007. Umang Bedi joined the firm in February 2018.

The company launched the short video platform, Josh, in 2020 soon after the TikTok ban and has clocked significant growth. However, ByteDance exited VerSe Innovation in June at a whopping 56 percent discount, Moneycontrol reported.