Mumbai: Dailyhunt, formerly Newshunt, an app which aggregates local language content, has raised $25 million in its series D round of funding led by China’s ByteDance with participation from Vodafone’s former CEO Arun Sarin, and its existing investors Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital. ByteDance owns one of the largest personalised news apps Toutiao in China, along with running TopBuzz in the US and Brazil. Sarin who earlier invested in Indian startups like taxi hailing company Ola and music streaming venture Saavn, will act as an advisor to Dailyhunt.

Virendra Gupta, Founder & CEO of Verse Innovation, which runs Dailyhunt, said the reason for brining on board ByteDance was to execute large scale personalization through machine learning which the Chinese company has done successfully. “We will continue to build tech and product capabilities along with investing behind brand building with this fresh infusion of capital. Our big focus is to offer better personalised content going forward so that engagement on our platform goes up further,” Gupta said.

Launched in 2012, Toutiao, which means “headlines” in Chinese uses big data and analytics to figure users’ preferences and offers what would be the most relevant content for them to consume. Valued at $500million, in its last financing round, the company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Sina Weibo, DST Global’s Yuri Milner, among others.

Getting investment from ByteDance is significant for Dailyhunt which claims to have over 28 million monthly active users on its platform providing regional language content through news, ebooks, videos. Gupta said with the launch of Reliance Jio there will a major up-tick in data usage among Indians which is expected to drive consumption of content on mobiles.

Dailyhunt is expected to be clocking Rs 8-9 crore monthly revenue run rate with users spending on an average 200 minutes per month on its platform. Gupta said the company is aiming to register revenues of $250-300 million in three to four years as it sharpens monetisation through advertising income. Around 70-80% of monetisation on Dailyhunt comes through advertising dollars.

In July, the Bengaluru-based company picked up a strategic stake in Greynium Information Technology, the publisher of vernacular portal Oneindia, besides a bunch of other websites. The investment was primarily aimed at expanding into other genres and introducing short format video and audio content in local languages. Mumbai-based investment bank Avendus Capital was the sole adviser to this transaction.

Source: Times of India

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