Dailyhunt Raises INR 73 Cr, Restructures Ownership After 26% FDI Cap

News and content aggregator Dailyhunt has raised INR 73 Cr in primary capital from B Capital Group, and the company is reportedly moving fast to rework its ownership structure, after the Indian government, last month, reiterated its decision of capping the foreign investment for digital media entities at 26% by October 2021. 

B Capital Asia is an investment firm founded by Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin. Dailyhunt counts Falcon Edge, Matrix Partners, ByteDance, Goldman Sachs, and Sofina as investors.

According to data on Crunchbase, the company last raised funds in April this year, worth INR 180 Cr, in its Series G round led by Falcon Edge Capital, also seeing participation from Goldman Sachs, Sofina and ByteDance. 

It is worth noting that ByteDance is a Chinese company which owns the once-popular short video app TikTok, banned in India on June 29. 

Dailyhunt operates three subsidiaries, Eterno Infotech, Rocket Science Innovations and Greynium Information. Of late, the company has diversified its operations, also launching a TikTok alternative short video app called Josh in July. 

According to the Economic Times, which first reported the development, Dailyhunt has classified itself as a business engaged in the “designing, developing, researching vertical search and recommendation services. It also engages in the development of software tools, products, and services for business analytics, services for internet content providers, advertising network, m-commerce, web telecom, etc.”

Launched in 2009 by Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, Newshunt began as a news aggregator. It was acquired by job classified company, Ver Se Innovation, in 2012. Later in August 2015, NewsHunt rebranded itself as Dailyhunt to offer news in vernacular languages.

As of April, Dailyhunt claimed to have over 1,300 publication partners, 250K news and content pieces every day in 14 languages. The Dailyhunt group claims to have 263 Mn monthly active users across all platforms, their app is said to have 208 Mn monthly active users. The company has over 500 employees.

Last month, the Indian government in a clarification note, said that the FDI cap would apply to digital media entities streaming or uploading news, agencies which gather, transmit and distribute news, and news aggregators, which collect news content from various sources and post them in one location. 

Digital media organisations which fall under any of the three categories mentioned above would have to comply with the 26% FDI cap within a year of the date of issuance of the clarification.

This month, digital news portals and streaming platforms such as Amazon Prime and Netflix were brought under the purview of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B).