NewsHunt acquires mobile analytics company Vauntz
The local language mobile app, NewsHunt, has ‘acqui-hired’ analytics and mobile platform company Vauntz.
This is the first acquisition by NewsHunt after its recent Rs 250 crore in Series C funding led by New York-based Hedge Fund Falcon Edge Capital. Existing investors Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India, and Omidyar Network also participated in the round.
Vauntz was founded by Shreyas Desai, Maruti Borker and Piyush Rai, and they have developed an analytics platform and a social shopping app. They have also worked with Flipkart, Khosla Labs, Philips and other companies.
Talking to YourStory, Virendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of NewsHunt, said he was impressed with the high-end software engineering skills and talent of the founding team of Vauntz and what they had built in such a small time frame.
He, however, declined to reveal the value of the deal.
“At NewsHunt, we are solving a yet unchartered and complex problem of local languages and have a strong vision to deliver the best in class personalised experience to users,” he said. According to Virendra, the Vauntz team will play a very crucial role in building the next generation platform for NewsHunt.
The Co-founder and CEO of Vauntz, Shreyas Desai, said, “We are excited to be a part of NewsHunt. It's a great opportunity to build large scale, world-class system that will enable millions of first time Internet users. Scale and opportunity are as big as e-commerce today.”
Shreyas has previously led technical teams in iStream and worked for Google and Yahoo before that.
Virendra said they are looking for more such acquisitions this year, and added, “We invite all stake holders in the eco-system to partner with us to create new digital content and get discovered and monetized through the NewsHunt platform.”
Newshunt is enhacing its platform capabilities to give more targetted and personalised experience to users in language of their choice and investing heavily into capabilites/talent building of machine learning, high-end distributed architecture and analytics and big data. It plans to create new categories in local language like videos, audio, test preparation, and local language apps through a mix of organic and inorganic efforts.
NewsHunt was founded in June 2009, and is headquartered in Bangalore. Some of its competitors include Feedly, Pulse and Flipboard.