Indian reader app NewsHunt flirts with ecommerce to make money

India’s NewsHunt, an app for local language newspapers and ebooks, today revealed that it acquired e­commerce recommendation tool BuyT ContentLink. The deal size remains undisclosed.

BuyT has developed a proprietary product discovery and recommendation platform that parses all major ecommerce sites in India for product updates and analyzes user behavior to provide contextual widgets.

With the acquisition, NewsHunt will integrate shopping options into its app.

Shopping mall meets library

NewsHunt founder Virendra Gupta says it’ll allow the news reader app to marry content with commerce. “This can create an entire mobile eco­system for news and e­books, transactions, ticketing, all in one place which is ­in effect a one-­stop shop for a mobile user,” he adds.

In the past, BuyT rolled out its service to marquee Indian publishers, serving 3 million recommendations per day. It claims of driving merchandise worth US$47 million annually for leading ecommerce players such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, and Amazon. BuyT will run as a standalone unit continuing its existing line of business whilst also enabling commerce for NewsHunt users.

Earlier this year, NewsHunt received US$40 million in series C funding led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital. Before that, it raised US$18 million led by Sequoia Capital.