NewsDog raises USD 50M in a Tencent-led series C financing round

NewsDog, an India-focused entertainment platform, on Tuesday announced that it has successfully completed its series C funding round, raising USD 50 million to further solidify its position in the burgeoning Indian digital content market.

Led by global internet company Tencent, followed by DHVC, Legend Capital and Dotc United Group, NewsDog's latest fundraise counts as one of the largest in the Indian digital content industry.

The platform plans to use the round proceeds to pursue its vision of empowering individuals and professional content creators to showcase their work and reach the digital mass public.

The company is also adopting blockchain technology to grow faster and make the content ecosystem transparent.

"Indian digital content industry is just getting started. Poly culture and multiple languages make content matching an incredibly hard problem. We believe that strong machine learning capabilities will be pivotal in scaling content platforms in India," said NewsDog's founder and CEO Forrest Chen.

"So far, we have made good initial progress but content business is like an endless journey. There is no finish line, you have to just keep running," he added.

"After the new round of financing, the company's expansion plans will focus on two aspects. One is to create a more dynamic content platform for users by enriching localised experience by adding more regional languages. The other is to constantly buttress our technical capabilities in order to provide users with a more personalised experience," said Yi Ma, co-founder and COO, NewsDog.

"NewsDog combines its leading technical capabilities with its deep pool of entertainment content to provide Indian users a personalised experience. We look forward to supporting NewsDog to become India's favourite online entertainment platform," said Forest Lin, Managing Partner of Tencent Investments.

NewsDog is best known for its advanced machine learning capabilities that enable a personalised content feed for users, matching their preferences.