ByteDance-backed news aggregator Dailyhunt has added another USD 3 million to its ongoing Series F round from Stonebridge Capital, according to the company’s filings with local authority.
The Bangalore-based startup just raised 22 million dollars from Sofina, a Belgium-based company. Rumor also has it that, the company has been in talks with SoftBank for additional fundings.
Nokia alumni co-founded a news and content app 10 years ago named NewsHunt and then rebranded it as DailyHunt in 2015. It claims to aggregate 250,000 news and content articles every day in 14 languages, gathered from over 1,300 publication partners. Out of India’s 725 districts, the company has a presence in 400 districts. It claims to have more than 207 million monthly active users, and expects to grow the number to more than 325 million which will make the startup “the largest digital media platform across the country.”
The growth of the firm has been aided by its investment in proprietary machine learning and deep learning technologies which tracks the readers’ preferences to deliver real-time, customized content and notifications. The Dailyhunt app is available on Android, iOS, Windows and mobile web platforms.
In India, content start-ups are finding their revenues flagging because to expand the user base heavy spending is to be incurred. Though Dailyhunt claims a revenue run rate of USD40 million, industry analysts differ. Some sources who spoke anonymously with local paper Mint said that, “Dailyhunt’s user growth has plateaued month-on-month since September 2018. While their revenue growth has been 100%, it has been tailing off this year because app downloads and user growth has slowed down.”
The company has a long list of competitors who include Inshorts, Helo, UCNews, Newsbytes, Way2News, The Quint, NewsDog, Glance, ShareChat, Shareit, and TikTok amongst others. Incidentally, Dailyhunt’s rivals like Helo, NewsDog, and UCNews are being backed with funding by Chinese investor giants like ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba respectively.
A report by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) said that the Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry would nearly double in size to USD123 billion by 2022.