Indian news app Dailyhunt raises $100m

The QIA and Glade Brook-led tranche also included Sofina and Canaan Valley Capital. Sofina participated in the investment last year as well, taking a 6.4% interest. Google acquired a 3% stake in that round, while Falcon Edge Capital took 6.3% and Microsoft took 1%.

Previous investors include Advent International, Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, Goldman Sachs, China’s ByteDance, and US-based Lupa Systems. Total funding to date amounts to about $430 million and is said to value the start-up at more than $1 billion.

Dailyhunt – originally known as Newshunt – was set up by several former Nokia executives in 2009, and they sold to Indian mobile internet operator VerSe Innovation three years later. The company was rebranded Dailyhunt in 2016, with Facebook’s former India head Umang Bedi in the role of president and engineer Virendra Gupta as CEO.

In addition to news, the mobile app offers e-books, magazines, comics, and videos in 14 Indian languages. Dailyhunt claims to have deep learning technology that enables personalized content and more than 300 million users. It will use the fresh capital to scale up a short-video platform called Josh, which currently has 40 million daily active users and more than 1.5 billion plays per day.

News apps are an established investment niche in India, with previous activity including Tencent Holdings leading a $50 million Series C for NewsDog, which also positions itself as a specialist in vernacular languages. Last year, InShorts, previously known as NewsInShorts, raised a $35 million round led by Addition, a firm launched by former Tiger Global Management investor Lee Fixel. 

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Expansion
• Consumer
• Media
• India
• Sofina
• Canaan Partners
• TMT