Dailyhunt plans to tie up with BSNL

News and ebooks mobile application Dailyhunt is in talks with telecom major BSNL to facilitate a tie-up so that users can make online payments for buying e-books, its co-founder and CEO Virendra Gupta today said.
"We are in touch with BSNL and I expect the deal to come about by December this year or January next year," he told PTI here.
The company has already tied up with Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Aircel and Reliance for such payments, Gupta said.
The existing mobile network operators are covering 80 to 85 per cent of addressable market and with the tie-up with BSNL, Dailyhunt aims to cover another 12 per cent of it, he added.

"With the existing mobile network operators that we have, we are covering 80 to 85 per cent of the addressable market. If we get BSNL, we will get 10-11 per cent - we will then be broadly covering everybody," he said.
On funding, he said the company had raised a capital of Rs 120 crore in a round led by Falcon Edge Capital earlier this year and would look at another round by next year.
The company is backed by venture capital investors Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital.
Since 2013, more than 28-million books have been downloaded from Dailyhunt and it plans to expand its library from around 1,00,000, primarily vernacular language books now, to 5,00,000 books by March 2016, Gupta further said.