News-aggregator Dailyhunt appoints ex-Facebook India head Umang Bedi as President

Former Facebook India's CEO Umang Bedi has joined news and entertainment aggregator Dailyhunt as its president.

The Harvard Business School Alumnus will help to scale up the revenue and user base of the newly joined company. He aims to win the majority of market share in the advertising space in the upcoming years for the platform.

Last October, Bedi had resigned as Managing Director of Facebook for India and South Asia.

Dailyhunt, formerly known as Newshunt, was started by Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni in 2009 and sold to Verse Innovation in 2012. The company was renamed as Dailyhunt in August 2015.

In the segment, Dailyhunt faces direct competition from NewsDog, InShorts and UC News.

While the aforementioned apps have a significant readership in English language, Dailyhunt (referred as India’s smallest and fastest news app) has been focusing on vernacular languages.

The news app serves content in 14 regional languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Kannada and others. It provides trending news articles across multiple genres including entertainment, business, and sports, amongst others.

Also Read: Tencent to invest $35-40 Mn in news aggregator app NewsDog

The Bengaluru- headquartered platform claims to have over 50 million active users, who spend about 6 Billion minutes on the application every month. It has also 155 million app installs offering 1 lakh news articles from over 800 publication partners.

The company also provides original video content in Hindi and Telugu with free live television streaming service with more than 130 channels across nine languages.

The platform has also partnered with Vuclip and YuppTV—over-the-top (OTT) video content space providers.

In 2016, Dailyhunt invested Rs 15 crore in OneIndia, a local language content provider and picked up a minority stake in the company.

It also raised $25 million in Series D funding from ByteDance. Previously, it raised $40million in Series C round led by Flacon Capital, Matrix Partners, and others.

The news was first reported by Mint.