Dailyhunt raises $25 mn Series D funding from ByteDance, others

Arun Sarin, former CEO of Vodafone, Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital, Omidyar and Falcon Edge are other participants

Dailyhunt, a local language app delivering news and e-books, has raised $25 million Series D funding led by ByteDance, a global digital content platform with over 138 million monthly active users for its news app Toutiao in China.

Arun Sarin, former CEO of Vodafone, and existing investors of Dailyhunt including Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, Omidyar and Falcon Edge also took part in the round.

Dailyhunt has over 28 million monthly active users and over 4.5 billion page views monthly and provides a wide range of regional language content by way of news, e-books, magazines, comics and videos. ByteDance also has news app TopBuzz in the US and Brazil, with personalised content recommendation based on algorithms.

ByteDance has experience in providing content in local language at scale, which would benefit Dailyhunt in its operations, said Virendra Gupta, founder and CEO of Dailyhunt. "We look forward to learn from ByteDance on personalisation and large scale machine learning to continue to offer a unique experience to our users," he added.

"Dailyhunt is addressing the next 400 million 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," said Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India.

Installed in over 120 million phones and available in 15 Indian languages, Dailyhunt has over 35,000 items published daily. Its users consume over 4.5 billion page views monthly.