NewsHunt, India’s answer to Flipboard, gets $16 million funding

India’s top homegrown news reader app, NewsHunt, has secured INR 1 billion (US$16.5 million) in series B funding. The newest investment for this Flipboard-esque app is led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Matrix Partners India and Omidyar Network also joining in, reports NextBigWhat.

NewsHunt now has 14 million monthly active users, mostly in India. The startup has apps for every mobile platform and also supports 11 Indian languages in addition to English.

Aside from aggregating national and international news, the app also has an ebookstore, a feature which was added late last year. So far, over four million ebooks have been downloaded within NewsHunt. Payments for ebooks are handled by the young company’s own epayments system, called iPayy, which supports carrier billing on some networks.

Feature phones still outsell smartphones in India, but a shift is gradually happening towards relatively affordable Android handsets made by Samsung and local rivals Micromax and Karbonn. As more people get smartphones, they’ll likely spend more time consuming content on the larger screens. 44 million new smartphones shipped in India in 2013.

“The era of the real Indian mobile internet written and consumed in local language is just beginning,” said Virendra Gupta, co–founder and CEO of NewsHunt, in an announcement. “Our vision is to create a made-for-India platform and work closely with publishers, developers, OEMs and other ecosystem partners to digitize, distribute, and monetize the consumption of local language.”

See: Get ready for India’s smartphone explosion – INFOGRAPHIC(Source: NextBigWhat)