China’s ByteDance leads $25m funding for Indian local language news app Dailyhunt

India’s leading app for news and other content in local languages, Dailyhunt (earlier known as Newshunt), has announced a series D funding round of US$25 million led by ByteDance. Former CEO of Vodafone Arun Sarin and existing investors Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Omidyar, and Falcon Edge participated in the round.

Beijing-based ByteDance has earlier backed Toutiao (Today’s Headlines) in China and TopBuzz in the US and Brazil. These are news apps that make personalized content recommendations based on user profiling and algorithms.

Dailyhunt, which had earlier raised US$37.5 million in its series C round led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital, is the most-used app for news and ebooks in India with 28 million monthly active users. That is nearly a third of the 90 million monthly active users that the leading global news aggregator Flipboard gets.

Made for India

Virendra Gupta, founder and CEO of Dailyhunt.

The internet is accessible mostly in English in India, although a large majority of Indians can’t read English. It’s a country with multiple local languages like Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Gujarati, each with large numbers of speakers. And most of them access the internet on mobile phones. This is the audience that Dailyhunt targets by aggregating content relevant and accessible to them.

“The next 400 million mobile internet users will be local language users. Now, they won’t consume the internet if it doesn’t talk to them [in their language],” Virendra Gupta, founder and CEO of Dailyhunt, told Terence Lee of Tech in Asia when he visited the Dailyhunt headquarters in Bangalore around this time last year.

Today Dailyhunt publishes 35,000 items a day, including news, ebooks, magazines, comics, and videos. It claims to get 4.5 billion page views in a month.

See: How Dailyhunt became one of the top news apps in the world

The Sequoia connection

“Dailyhunt has grown by partnering with publishers, developers, OEMs, advertisers, and others in the ecosystem,” says Virendra in a statement on the funding. “[Now] we look forward to learning from ByteDance on personalization and machine learning to continue to offer a unique experience to our users.”

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of ByteDance, sees a long-term partnership with Dailyhunt which he believes will be the leading mobile content platform in India. “Dailyhunt is serving a huge unmet need of providing local language content to Indian mobile users,” he points out.

Both Dailyhunt and ByteDance come under the Sequoia umbrella and that’s how the two connected. “ByteDance is one of the hottest and fastest growing companies today globally and when Viru met Yiming, they immediately saw an opportunity to partner and deliver personalized content to the world’s largest populations. It’s going to be a fun ride,” says Mohit Bhatnagar, MD of Sequoia Capital India Advisors.