NewsHunt, India’s news reader app for local languages, raises $40.5M in funding

India’s homegrown news reader app NewsHunt has secured INR 2.5 billion (US$40.5 million) in a series C funding round led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital. Existing investors Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, and Omidyar Network also participated in this round of funding, reports NextBigWhat.

Newshunt raised US$16 million in a Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital last year.

The app has a wide collection of regional content in over 12 languages making it the leading app for local language users in India with about 75 million downloads to date.

Aside from aggregating national and international news, the app also has an ebookstore. So far, over 10 million ebooks have been downloaded by 2 million NewsHunt users. 40 percent of the users are paid members.

Payments for ebooks are handled by the company’s own epayments system, called iPayy, which supports carrier billing for microtransactions. In the last six months, an estimated 4 million unique customers have used the iPayy platform for payments.

“The next 500 million mobile internet users that will emerge in India will largely be local language first. They will create and consume content and services in local languages. Our vision is to be a dominant part of their first internet experience,” said Viru Gupta, founder and CEO of Newshunt

NewsHunt supports the country’s top English dailies but the bigger draw is the coverage of the vernacular newspapers around the country. The app also supports a few publications from Bangladesh and the African continent. NewsHunt app users consume a cumulative average of 1.7 billion pages per month.

Source: (NextBigWhat)

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