News App DailyHunt has a user base of 100M+ and continues to be one of the largest content aggregators and publishers.
BrilliantRead aims at sharing compelling stories from the startup ecosystems and one such startup solving the day-to-day problems of newspaper readers who want the news shared in online in their vernacular or in their local languages which is taken care by the 155 M+ app installs, trending in number one in news app in Google Play store Daily hunt (News hunt).
It is a news, magazines and eBooks app which publishes aggregates and delivers news in 14 languages to its beloved customers. It is a giant group with 80M+ users spending over 7 B+ minutes on its app every month making the company the best news and local language content app. Founded by Virendra Gupata, the former Director Telecom at Trilogy, General Manager at Bharti Cellular Ltd, now serving as the CEO of its founded company Daily Hunt and its parent organization Verse Innovation Pvt. Ltd. with a mission of’BetheIndic platform, empowering a billion Indians to discover, consume & socialize with content that informs, enriches and entertains’ started the company in2012 in Bangalore, Karnataka by acquiring Newshunt (which was started in 2009) from Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrasekhar Sohoni and changing it to Daily hunt.
The startup provides unbiased news, videos and viral cards in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, English, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, Punjabi and Urdu. Through its smart technology it personalizes its content as per the user’s requirements and delivers the nation’s biggest news sources to local correspondents in every constituency at the fingertips of the more than 150 million users. Users can browse their interest topics and share news over different social media platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook.
Daily hunt had acquired Buyt.In in July 15, 2015 which is a search engine portal that enables its users to discover, compare, and purchase products from a range of e-commerce portals based in New Delhi, India. It was founded on August, 2012 with a mission to become the Google for e-commerce. Founded by Yogesh Tomar and Biswanath Patel, Buyt ContentLink enables the information flow from a merchant/service provider to the consumer. The platform has integrated content with commerce by making product recommendation available at the point of consumer research on leading publisher platforms. It provides the customers with most relevant products and their customized list of prices. Daily hunt has acquired Buyt to focus on building the next generation platform for Daily hunt which plans to integrate shopping & commerce options for local language users on the its platform. This will also add to BuyT’s huge network of content publishers. Buyt.In has been earlier funded by the Value First Digital Media (a Enterprise Value Added Services company which provides seamless end-to-end business communication solutions to its clients on various platforms like SMS, Voice, USSD, and WAP based in Gurugram, Haryana and was founded on 2003) with a seed funding of $ 1 M on July, 2013.
Daily hunt has invested in One India, the local news language portal owned by Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh. (Greynium Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd.) on 2016 at a value $ 2.2 M and with a minority stake of 15 crore rupees. The founders were the brains behind the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2014 digital campaigns during the elections. The deal will help Dailyhunt, which focuses on local language users, generate multimedia content, especially short format video and audio, for its platform. The two companies already have a content partnership. “It’s time for local language content generation to go more deep, like it has in English. We need content in both audio and video, and more short format content appealing to the demographics of the country. We are supporting non-news content with this investment,” said Virendra Gupta, founder & CEO of Dailyhunt during the deal and he has also joined the board of Greynium One India founded in 2006 by BG Mahesh.
DailyHunt Funding & Investors
Dailyhunt has raised a total of $98.1M in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised from Sofina on May 15, 2019 in a Series F round
Daily hunt has investors such as Matrix Partners (a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Internet or wireless sectors founded by Paul Ferri on 1977), Sequoia Capital, Falcon India, and Byte Dance.
It had its Series B round funding on September 22, 2014 from Sequoia Capital India (a VC firm that supports south Asian companies) along with other 2 investors and raised 100 M rupees. On February 6, 2015 it raised $40 M as part of Series C round from Falcon Capital (a VC firm that executes financial transactions and offers capital raising and corporate advisory services) along with other 3 investors. On October 15, 2016 it raised $25 M from Byte Dance (a Chinese Internet Technology company headquartered in Beijing founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012 who is also the owner of TikTok and Vigo Video) and other 5 investors as part of Series D round. On September 3, 2018 and January 18, 2019 it raised a combined $252.1 M from Falcon Edge Capital (a VC and hedge fund based in New York, United States and was founded in 2011), Omidyar Network (a philanthropic investment firm established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) and Sequoia Capital. Latest DailyHunt funding round was on May 15, 2019 where the company raised $22 M as part of Series F from Sofina (a Belgian company that supports entrepreneurs and their growing companies which was founded more than 120 years ago as an engineering conglomerate. It invests in sectors such as telecommunication, portfolio companies, banks and insurance, private equity, services within the company, consumer goods, energy, distribution and various other sectors).
