Dashverse Raises USD 13 Mn in Funding Round Led by Peak XV Partners

AI startup Dashverse has raised USD 13 million, about ₹114 crore, in a funding round led by venture capital firm Peak XV Partners, the company said on Tuesday.

Stellaris Venture Partners and Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) also participated in the funding round of the startup which focuses on platforms for generating entertainment content using artificial intelligence.

"Dashverse, the full stack AI entertainment company developing platforms for mobile-first entertainment, today announced it has closed a USD 13 million Series A funding, making it the largest Series A round in the sector.

"The round was led by Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA) with participation from returning investors Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India) and Stellaris Venture Partners," the company said in a statement.

Dashverse has over 90% of its team based in India.

Talking about the fund utilisation, Dashverse , Co-founder and CEO, Sanidhya Narain told PTI that the company will mainly use the fund for the development and operations of web application Frameo.AI and mobile app DashReels.

Narain said that the cost of training even a single image model using GPU is as high as USD 2 million dollars and therefore the platform requires huge cost to operate.

"A lot of investment will go into remaining on the cutting edge with how fast AI is developing and how expensive it is to train these models," he said.

The company has applied for seeking access to government-funded GPU facilities under the IndiaAI mission and is waiting for approvals to access more high-end servers to lower its cost of technology development.

Narain expects the distribution business to reach break-even soon but the company's goal is to create a very robust and large ecosystem that will require continuous efforts and hiring even more and better talent.

He said even good AI talents are coming at very high cost.

"A million dollars has become a joke. So, just to attract talent and to be able to build, in the coming years also a lot of investment will flow into it. I hope we are able to place the money that we did to stay on the cutting edge," Narain said.

The company will initially focus on achieving a threshold of 100 million users before expanding business overseas.

"We have our aspiration to go global. But first we want to improve and build a payroll in the India market. If we are a winner in this AI and microdata space, our ambition is to go global.

"There is not a global product similar to us like that in the world. So, we want to go there first as soon as we prove it," Narain said.

The company is also planning to come up with a 'freemium model' after 6-7 months for users which will give access to limited features to users for free and rest of the tools will be for paid users only, he said.