Dailyhunt tops up Series Ground with Rs 38 Cr from Belgium-based Sofina

This takes the total of Dailyhunt’s Series G funding round to Rs 218 crore approximately. Only a few days ago, Dailyhunt’s existing investors ByteDance, Falcon Edge, Advent Management, and Goldman Sachs participated in the Series G1 round.

Started as NewsHunt in 2009 by former Nokia employees Chandrashekhar Sohoni and Umesh Kulkarni, the platform was acquired by Verse Founder Virendra Gupta in 2012. In eight years, the startup has aggregated news for millions of information-starved Indians.

Since 2016, it has acquired four companies, beginning with OneIndia in July 2016. In June 2019, Dailyhunt acquired LocalPlay, a hyperlocal video and news content application, in a bid to boost its presence in Tier-II and III geographies.
Now, it is readying its platform for video, which it believes will become the primary driver of information. At present, the startup has more than 500 hyperlocal channels on its video platform.
At some point in the near future, Dailyhunt plans to revive content commerce, and with the acquisition of LocalPlay, it believes it can power local videos to drive local advertising.

“We have built our own real-time bidding engine for ads. Our tech stack is using machine learning to help our readers, advertisers, and content creators,” says Virendra, in an earlier conversation with YourStory.

Dailyhunt has raised a total of more than $150 million in funding over seven rounds, so far, from investors including Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India, and Arun Sarin, ex-chief executive officer of Vodafone.