India's Dailyhunt raises $450m at $3b valuation

Carlyle is investing via its second pan-Asia growth fund, which was launched in April. Sigular Guff, Baillie Gifford, Sofina, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and BCap also participated. It comes six months after a Series H raised about $200 million across two tranches.

The Series H valued the company at about $1 billion and included QIA, Sofina, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Canaan Valley Capital, Falcon Edge Capital, Google, Microsoft, and Lupa Systems. The Series I target was $250 million, making it more than 2x oversubscribed, according to Livemint.

Dailyhunt – originally known as Newshunt – was set up by several former Nokia executives in 2009, and they sold to VerSe, a mobile internet operator, 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 a short-video platform called Josh that reaches 56 million daily active users in 14 Indian languages.

Dailyhunt claims to have deep learning technology that enables personalized content and for an overall user base of more than 300 million. It will use the fresh capital to build out technology in user engagement and retention, as well as areas such as e-commerce and live-streaming.

Much of the momentum for Indian media and video apps has been attributed to political tensions with China last year that resulted in the banning of dozens of Chinese media apps. This included short-video leader Tiktok, which had some 200 million users in the country.

Other standout beneficiaries of this development include ShareChat, which has grown from a $700 million valuation in September 2020 to a $3 billion valuation as its Series F last month.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Media
• Expansion
• Consumer
• India
• The Carlyle Group
• Sofina
• QIA
• TMT