“India has for decades been a market that has leap-frogged certain steps in their own tech journey. Our internet usage has been predominantly on the mobile phone rather than any desktop or laptop,” said Arjun Ghose, founder of Veera.
“Our browser accounts for the fact that most of our users’ internet journey begins on the phone and has created an application that works best on the phone and is focused on the phone, unlike others who adapt their desktop versions for the phone.”
The app, entirely developed in India with tailored content and ad blocking services, competes largely with global internet browsers including Microsoft, Google chrome and Apple safari.
As a challenger browser for India, Veera is created by Ghose, previously an investor with VC firm Falcon Edge, Alpha Wave and McKinsey, Rahul Pagdipati, chairman of the board Zebpay and board member at Brave browser, Aditya Julka, serial entrepreneur founder of Paddle8, and Kanu Gupta, founding leadership of Goldman Sachs in India and serial investor
The company is funded by a slew of blue-chip investors including Ayon Capital, COG Network, 6th Man Ventures, Folius Ventures and iSeed Ventures, as well as marquee angels.
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“We have looked at packaging critical features for customers, right into the application without the need to activate or add it and have it work immediately upon launching the app. And we are constantly launching new features every month so that as people get comfortable with one, they have a new one that continues to make their browsing journey better,” Ghose added.In Q2 2022, the installed base of smartphones in India, according to Counterpoint, stood at 600 million. Indians are adding around 150 million devices every year at the moment. With the market expanding rapidly it will hit a billion installed smartphones within this decade, ensuring more users to tap into and specially a user base that’s spending more time on their phone each day.
For most search engines, monetization is mostly through advertising and is fundamentally a sorted and ranked directory of all websites on the internet. Hence their monetization model builds on promoting one destination over another. For internet browsers, monetization can be through a few different levers – default search engine revenue share, affiliate marketing, advertising, ecommerce focused innovations, customer re-engagement etc.
