Lucknow-based Viral News Platform Knocksense Raises Seed Funding from Amitesh Pandey

Knocksense, a two-year-old Lucknow-based startup has raised seed funding from Amitesh Pandey (Founder of VBS Infravision Private Limited).

Knocksense is a fast growing lifestyle website currently operational in Lucknow, Goa & Delhi-NCR. Further, the startup plans to expand to Indore, Jaipur and other growing tier-II cities in India.

The startup also owns another vertical for mobile, tech and gadget news, Techsense, which was started in July 2018.

The local discovery and recommendation portal was founded in 2016 by Whistling Woods alumnus Vibhore Mayank and Amity University alumnus Varul Mayank. Unlike other websites, Knocksense was founded in Lucknow and was the first new-age Media company to be based out of Uttar Pradesh’s capital.

Commenting on the fundraise, Varul Mayank, co-founder of Knocksense, said, “Funding came at an important time for Knocksense. In the last two months, we were rapidly expanding to other regions and these funds will help us in improving our platform," he added.

Talking about the investment, Amitesh Pandey said, “Being from a media background, I was looking to invest in a media startup which was helping localities in finding the best things to do in a city. What attracted me the most to invest in Knocksense was its local presence in Lucknow. Being a regular Knocksense reader since 2017, I believed that their approach and content if replicated well in other smaller cities can definitely be a boon for localities and businesses alike.”

Knocksense plans to invest these funds in improving its IT infrastructure and start new cities. "Tier-II cities with an active millennial audience will be our next target. We are planning to launch new verticals next year which will further help the businesses in reaching out to local audience and vice-versa," Varul added.

We are also going to use Raghav Bahl backed-CMS, Quintype to power Knocksense’s IT infrastructure. Quintype’s functionality will further help us in reaching our target audience, he said.

LSR alumnus Neelansha Dwivedi initially invested in Knocksense in 2017. She has now joined Knocksense as the head of its editorial team.

Knocksense is a leisure reading portal, which aims to write on topics which are generally left uncovered by mainstream media. Knocksense covers various categories such as Tech, Food, Events, Culture, Travel, Startups and other Entertainment based stories.

Knocksense calls itself a ‘local discovery cum recommendation platform’, which informs people of the best places to hangout in their city. Knocksense was started in 2016 in Lucknow. Besides Lucknow, Knocksense is currently working in Indore, Goa & Delhi. Knocksense also has another vertical for mobile, tech and gadget news called Techsense, which was started in July 2018.

Lucknow Startup Ecosystem

About startup ecosystem in and around Lucknow, the state government of Uttar Pradesh had recently revealed its plan to develop the country’s largest startup in Lucknow. The state has identified about 40 acres of land near Lucknow Airport, which is on outskirts of the city, for the proposed startup incubation ecosystem comprising data centre, business processes outsourcing (BPO), development centre, training centres etc.

Very few startups from Luchnow or Uttar Pradesh have managed to raise funding and one of them was education startup EduGorilla, which had raised funding in July 2017.

In May 2016, an another Lucknow-based education startup EduAce Services raised USD 1 million (about Rs.6.6 crore) in seed funding from MoMagic.

In One of the Largest in Content Startups, NewsDog Raises $50 Mn Funding from Tencent & others

Gurgaon headquartered mobile-based news and entertainment content aggregator NewsDog has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding led by Chinese internet giant Tencent, reported Economic Times. The funding is being touted as one of the largest start-up deals in the news and entertainment content space.

Other investors who participated in the round include California-based venture capital firm DHVC, Legend Capital and Dotc United Group.

The funds raised will be used by NewsDog to increase the number of professional content creators in the Indian market, besides product development.

Launched in early 2016 by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Forrest Chen and Yi Ma, NewsDog is an intelligent news APP which not only shows the categorized news, but also studies users'​ reading habits and recommends news to each user accordingly. Owned by Hong Kong-based Hacker Interstellar and headquartered in Gurgaon near Delhi, NewsDog collates articles in English and various regional Indian languages including Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.

NewsDog app, which is available in 10 Indian vernacular languages, has been topping the Google Play store news category since 2016 and claims to have over 50 million users. NewsDog presently has two offices in India, in Pune and Gurgaon, and plans to setup offices throughout the country in 2018.

NewsDog also launched a content platform WeMedia, which enables users to submit content. Presently, WeMedia has over 30,000 writers contributing content.

NewsDog competes with players such as Toutiao-backed Dailyhunt, Tiger Global-backed Inshorts, and NewsPoint, owned by Times Internet, part of the group which publishes The Economic Times.

Digital content-based startups in India are fast attracting the investors' interest. In February, Kochi-based inFact, a mobile app that aggregates news and infotainment content, had reportedly raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Joel George, a Saudi Arabia-based angel investor. In December 2017, Noida-based content discovery app Inshorts had raised $5 million from existing investor Tiger Global in a bridge round of funding.

In February, it was reported that 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.

In October 2016, Bengaluru-based Dailyhunt had raised $25 million in Series D funding round led by ByteDance, a global tech company operating content platforms worldwide. Existing investors, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge, Omidyar and former CEO of Vodafone, Arun Sarin, also participated in the round.

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

18-Year-Old Launches India’s First Print Newspaper Aggregator 'Paperboy'

Bangalore based Jonna Venkata Karthik Raja the 18 year old Founder of Paperboy is ecstatic as his 15 months of toil has finally come to fruition. Paperboy is a mobile app that features the widest range of Indian newspapers and magazines that is uploaded on real time on to its platform. Paperboy is a language agnostic platform and will hence feature vernacular publications which is a crucial part of Indian news consumption habits. Paperboy aims to appeal to the global readership base of newspapers and envisions to becoming the ultimate platform to browse, buy and read each one’s local news on the go.

Paperboy is an online news discovery and distribution application that aggregates newspapers and magazines accessible on any platform. It is a marketplace for consumers who prefer print media over digital media. Paperboy was launched with vision to provide readers with first-hand information on the current happenings in their city/town, on their favourite local daily, in any part of the world. The idea was born from a simple idea of the importance of newspapers in all our lives.

Paperboy currently lists over 400 newspapers and magazines nationally and is live on the Google Playstore.
Karthik Raja conceptualized this idea as he was finishing school, when he found that he was missing his daily routine newspaper whenever he was travelling. It wasn’t too late before his entrepreneurial instincts kicked in and he went about developing a blue print for the platform. He then went about enlisting the support of his parents who were very encouraging and supportive of his venture.

Originally launched with just two team members, Paperboy has now grown into a team of 50 young, energetic and enterprising individuals. With their primary focus on Tier 2 and 3 cities, which represents almost 31.16 % of India’s population, Paperboy has already aggregated the widest variety of regional newspapers on their platform.
Adds young Jonna Venkata Karthik Raja - Founder, Paperboy "I conceptualized Paperboy as I found a distinctive correlation between newspaper reading and digital devices. When I found that I was missing my everyday newspaper while travelling, it prompted me to find a solution for this, albeit digitally. Research and discussions with my friends led me to developing the online platform that can present news each day on a screen of your choice. In the long run I am hoping to take this solution to other markets oversees as the platform can easily be scaled to accommodate any language."

With a clean and simple interface, the app contains no pop up ads or interferences, and lets one access their news both in online and offline mode; thus, making it easy to for people to read their favourite newspapers at their convenience. Inspired by the increased adoption of digital content all over the world, Paperboy now brings the daily newspaper tailored to your device, be it Android, iOS or the web. It provides the same experience of reading one’s favourite newspaper but on a screen which is the in-vogue format of choice today.

The platform will provide publishing houses the ability to upload and distribute their publications throughout the country. Uniting newspapers into one application, Paperboy aims to broaden the global readership base of newspapers.