The digital social media unicorn, VerSe Innovation, on Wednesday announced that it has acquired photo and video sharing app, Vebbler for an undisclosed value. This is the second acquisition by VerSe in a period of two weeks. Last month, VerSe Innovation had acquired AI-startup Cognirel Technologies.

With this acquisition, the company aims to build the largest digital media platform that serves unmet content needs of millions of consumers using technology.

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Leveraging Vebbler’s camera and community will give Josh a powerful differentiator in the market and present millions of Josh users the additional opportunity to harness India’s diverse creativity and talent, it added.

Speaking about the acquisition of Vebbler, VerSe Innovation founder Virendra Gupta said, “The combination of Vebbler’s product capabilities with our platform will improve our ability to drive innovation around the camera and social engagement and play a more meaningful role in capturing the mindshare, timeshare, and revenue share of Bharat’s local language users.”

VerSe Innovation co-Founder Umang Bedi said the company will continue to build and acquire powerful tools and technologies that deliver products that are consumer-focused and content-forward.

In the last three months, the company has attracted over USD 200 million investment from global marquee investors such as Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar, and Glade Brook Capital Partners, along with Google, Microsoft, and AlphaWave (a unit of Falcon Edge Capital).

Founded by Sahil Bhagat, Vebbler allows people to join groups called ‘clubs’ and share photos and videos around different interests like fashion, travel, photography and entertainment.

With over 100 categories, users create content using Vebbler’s camera, packed with creation tools such as AI-based neural-art filters, effects, stickers, GIFs, drawing tools and fonts along with proprietary technology on video processing and editing.

Vebbler was backed initially by actors, Dino Morea and Nikhil Chinapa. Originally, Vebbler was designed as a private way to share photos and videos with friends in real-time at events, such as holidays, weddings and concerts, which then pivoted into an interest-based network in 2018.

“My vision with Vebbler was to build a video first social media platform out of India. Our use case, domain understanding, technology expertise is unique in the Indian market. In VerSe Innovation’s vision, we find strategic synergies between Josh and Vebbler,” Vebbler founder Sahil Bhagat said.

Josh is a homegrown short-video app that launched in September 2020 by VerSe Innovation. Currently, Josh has over 85 million MAUs (Monthly Active Users), 40 million DAUs (Daily Active Users) and more than 1.5 billion video plays per day.