Local language news aggregator Dailyhunt has raised around $ 100 million in a new round from Google, Microsoft, and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation. Existing sponsors of the Bengaluru-based company, Sofina Group and Lupa Systems, also participated in the round.
According to the Dailyhunt, he has crossed the billion dollar valuation mark and entered the unicorn club.
The new revenue will be used to expand Dailyhunt’s Josh short video app and develop its ecosystem of content creators. It also plans to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to expand its short video application. Josh was thrown out shortly after the Indian government banned TikTok on June 29.
Since the TikTok ban, Josh has been able to gain significant market share in the short video sharing segment. Currently, it claims to have more than 77 million monthly active users, 36 million daily active users with more than 1.5 billion daily video views.
It’s worth noting that Josh was the most downloaded short video app among local businesses during the October-November period. Based on data from Sensor Tower, Josh downloaded more than 12 million times followed by 8.14 million Moj and 6.9 million MX TakaTak between October 23 and November 22.
The announcement of the Dailyhunt funding round comes a month after it raised about $ 10 million from B Capital. According to an ET report, the company had also begun to restructure its operations to meet the government’s compliance with the FDI limit for digital media companies.
Two months ago, the Indian government had clarified that digital media entities must limit foreign investment to 26% by October 2021.
Founded as Newshunt in 2009, the company was renamed Dailyhunt in 2015. The content aggregation application is available in vernacular languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, and others. Dailyhunt further claims that it has more than 300 million users across its various applications and a network of more than 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.
Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, and Goldman Sachs are Dailyhunt’s other key investors.
