Tencent leads $50m round for India's NewsDog
China's Tencent Holdings has led a $50 million Series C round for NewsDog, an Indian vernacular language news app founded by Chinese entrepreneurs.
Additional participants in the round include Sino-US venture investor Danhua Capital, Chinese VC firm Legend Capital, and Chinese app developer DOTC United Group. NewsDog plans to use the new capital to expand its user base by adding more languages to its online platform and to improve the user experience by adding more personalization options.
NewsDog was launched in 2016 by serial entrepreneur Forrest Chen and Yi Ma, formerly of Baidu and Goldman Sachs. The company offers news, images and video content in English and nine local Indian languages and allows users to create personalized news feeds. Recently NewsDog launched WeMedia, a platform for users to write and submit their own stories.
The company claims to be India’s leading news aggregation app with over 50 million users. Its competitors include Tiger Global-backed News in Shorts as well as Dailyhunt, which has received backing from VC investors such as Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners along with Chinese VC-backed online content provider ByteDance.
ByteDance operates Toutiao, which began as a news aggregation service and now claims to be the largest content platform in China, with 120 million monthly users consuming news, music, video and user-submitted content. Its success has been cited as a model for news aggregators operating in India, a market with similar size to China and currently experiencing a period of rapid online adoption.
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