Alibaba To Pick 10-12% Stake In Dailyhunt At Valuation of $500 Million

China’s Alibaba group is in talks to buy a minority stake in Sequoia Capital-backed Dailyhunt (formerly Newhunt), a news aggregator and e-bookstore, reported Livemint, citing two people aware of the development.

Alibaba has already proposed a valuation close to $500 million for Dailyhunt. The talks are, however, not yet conclusive as Dailyhunt is also looking for other funding options apart from Alibaba, said the report.

The deal will be a minority stake sale in which Alibaba is looking to acquire anywhere between 10% to 12%, depending upon the final negotiations, the report further added.

In 2015, Goldman Sachs Group named Dailyhunt as one of the possible “billion-dollar babies” among India’s internet startups. Dailyhunt claims to be India’s largest news and local language content application with over 155 million app installs offering 100,000 news articles in 14 languages, licensed from over 800 publication partners everyday.

Founded in 2009 by former Nokia executives Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, Dailyhunt was originally launched as eBooks company with brand name of Newshunt. Later in 2012, the company was acquired by Verse Innovation, which raised ₹100 crore from Sequoia in 2014 and then in February 2015 it raised ₹120 crore in Series D from Falcon Edge and in the same year it was rebranded as Dailyhunt.

The startup last raised $25 million in Series D funding led by ByteDance, in October 2016. Till date, Dailyhunt has raised about $67 million in three different rounds, according to data by Crunchbase, a startup funding tracking website.

In July 2016, Dailyhunt had also picked up a minority stake in local news language portal, OneIndia, for Rs. 15 crore.

Beside digital content (Dailyhunt), Alibaba is also reportedly planning to launch an over the top (OTT) video service in India, in association with Paytm and UCWeb.

This month, Alibaba has already invested whopping $500 million in India's Bigbasket and Zomato. Last month, the Chinese firm also picked up a $35 million stake in logistics startup Xpressbees, spun out of baby products retailer FirstCry.

Alibaba To Pick 10-12% Stake In Dailyhunt At Valuation of $500 Million

China’s Alibaba group is in talks to buy a minority stake in Sequoia Capital-backed Dailyhunt (formerly Newhunt), a news aggregator and e-bookstore, reported Livemint, citing two people aware of the development.

Alibaba has already proposed a valuation close to $500 million for Dailyhunt. The talks are, however, not yet conclusive as Dailyhunt is also looking for other funding options apart from Alibaba, said the report.

The deal will be a minority stake sale in which Alibaba is looking to acquire anywhere between 10% to 12%, depending upon the final negotiations, the report further added.

In 2015, Goldman Sachs Group named Dailyhunt as one of the possible “billion-dollar babies” among India’s internet startups. Dailyhunt claims to be India’s largest news and local language content application with over 155 million app installs offering 100,000 news articles in 14 languages, licensed from over 800 publication partners everyday.

Founded in 2009 by former Nokia executives Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, Dailyhunt was originally launched as eBooks company with brand name of Newshunt. Later in 2012, the company was acquired by Verse Innovation, which raised ₹100 crore from Sequoia in 2014 and then in February 2015 it raised ₹120 crore in Series D from Falcon Edge and in the same year it was rebranded as Dailyhunt.

The startup last raised $25 million in Series D funding led by ByteDance, in October 2016. Till date, Dailyhunt has raised about $67 million in three different rounds, according to data by Crunchbase, a startup funding tracking website.

In July 2016, Dailyhunt had also picked up a minority stake in local news language portal, OneIndia, for Rs. 15 crore.

Beside digital content (Dailyhunt), Alibaba is also reportedly planning to launch an over the top (OTT) video service in India, in association with Paytm and UCWeb.

This month, Alibaba has already invested whopping $500 million in India's Bigbasket and Zomato. Last month, the Chinese firm also picked up a $35 million stake in logistics startup Xpressbees, spun out of baby products retailer FirstCry.

Matrix Backed Dailyhunt Raises $25M in Series D Funding Led by ByteDance

Dailyhunt – India’s leading local language app has raised $25 million in its Series D funding round led by ByteDance. ByteDance is a global digital content platform with over 138 million monthly active users of its news app Toutiao in China. Arun Sarin, former CEO of Vodafone & existing investors of Dailyhunt - Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, Omidyar and Falcon Edge also participated in the round.

Dailyhunt is India’s most popular local language app with over 28 million monthly active users and over 4.5 billion page views monthly. Through its platform, it provides the widest collection of regional language content in form of news, eBooks, magazines, comics and videos.

Zhang Yiming, Founder and CEO of ByteDance, said, “Dailyhunt is serving a huge unmet need of providing local language content to Indian mobile users and has grown with its localized approach ad business model. We are excited about a long-term partnership here and believe in Dailyhunt’s long term potential to be the leading mobile content platform in India”.

Virendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of Dailyhunt, said, “Dailyhunt has grown by partnering with publishers, developers, OEMs, advertisers and other ecosystem partners. We want to thank our partners for their support and reaffirm our commitment to the local language digital ecosystem. The investment by ByteDance, who has done this at scale, reinforces our belief in the opportunity. We look forward to learn from ByteDance on personalization and large scale machine learning to continue to offer a unique experience to our users”.

“Dailyhunt is addressing the next 400M users who will be brought online by the coming explosion in data usage. We believe in their approach of working with every ecosystem player to bring the best content to the user. We are privileged to partner with Viru and the team at Dailyhunt and welcome ByteDance to the board and look forward to partnering with them to build a local language platform” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India.

Image: Virendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of Dailyhunt

Dailyhunt Picks Up Minority Stake in OneIndia for Rs 15 Cr

News and ebooks mobile application Dailyhunt has picked up a minority stake in local news language portal, OneIndia, for Rs. 15 crore. The investment will help Dailyhunt expand its partnership with OneIndia, which is owned by Greynium Information Technologies.

The deal will help Dailyhunt, which focuses on local language users, generate multimedia content, especially short format video and audio, for its platform, as reported by ET. The two companies already have a content partnership.

"It's time for local language content generation to go more deep, like it has in English. We need content in both audio and video, and more short format content appealing to the demographics of the country. We are supporting non-news content with this investment," said Virendra Gupta, founder & CEO of Dailyhunt.

Gupta will also join the board of Greynium as part of the deal. OneIndia was founded in January 2006 by Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh, it provides local language content and publishes content across genres such as lifestyle, entertainment, technology, automobiles, travel, personal finance and education in eight local languages.

Besides OneIndia, its websites include that's Cricket, FilmiBeat and CareerIndia. It reaches 35 million unique visitors and 500-million page views a month.

OneIndia was initially funded by Jain, who acquired the company in 2010 through his company Netcore. Jain was also an investor in Greynium when it started out.

This investment is the part of DailyHunt's aim to focus on generating revenues from advertising dollars, as global multinationals are also increasing their spend on digital with increasing smartphone penetration.

"Greynium has been a key player in the local languages space, and this position will be further strengthened by Dailyhunt's reach across India. It also ties in well with our plans for producing video content in vernacular languages, which we expect to be the next big growth wave for us," said Mahesh.

Image : BG Mahesh