[Funding alert] Dailyhunt raises $35.6M from James Murdoch’s firm Lupa India

DailyHunt, the news aggregator platform, continues to receive top-up investments with the latest investor being Lupa India, which is backed by media magnate James Murdoch.

According to regulatory filings, Dailyhunt in its Series G funding round raised a top round of $35.6 million from Lupa India, with issuance of shares at a price of Rs 12,995.84 per share.

This Bengaluru-headquartered news aggregator, in a span of two weeks prior to this investment, raised around Rs 220 crore as part of its Series G funding round. This include investors such as Sofina Group, ByteDance, Falcon Edge, Advent Management, and Goldman Sachs.

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This is the second investment by James Murdoch in India as four months ago, Lupa had backed e-learning firm Harappa  Education.

Started as NewsHunt in 2009 by former Nokia employees Chandrashekhar Sohoni and Umesh Kulkarni, the platform was acquired by Verse Founder Virendra Gupta in 2012.

In eight years, the startup has aggregated news for millions of Indians. Since 2016, it has acquired four companies, beginning with OneIndia in July 2016. In June 2019, Dailyhunt acquired LocalPlay, a hyperlocal video and news content application, in a bid to boost its presence in Tier-II and III geographies.

The news aggregation app is available across vernacular languages, and apart from its operations in India, it has a presence in several countries including Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and in a few African countries.

Now, it is readying its platform for video, which it believes will become the primary driver of information. At present, the startup has more than 500 hyperlocal channels on its video platform. At some point in the near future, Dailyhunt plans to revive content commerce, and with the acquisition of LocalPlay, it believes it can power local videos to drive local advertising.

“We have built our own real-time bidding engine for ads. Our tech stack is using machine learning to help our readers, advertisers, and content creators,” said Virendra, in an earlier conversation with YourStory.