Exclusive: Dailyhunt mops up $36 Mn from James Murdoch’s Lupa India at a valuation of $625 Mn

Local language news aggregator Dailyhunt had recently kickstarted its series G funding round and raised Rs 180 crore just last week. It has now been topped with $35.6 million (Rs 267.1 crore) from James Murdoch’s Lupa India. 

This is the second investment by media mogul James Murdoch in India. Four months ago, Lupa backed e-learning firm Harappa Education.

According to regulatory filings, DailyHunt is allotting 205,523 Series G3 preference shares and 10 equity shares to Lupa India Holdings LLC at a price of Rs 12,995.84 each share.

Once the transaction goes through, Lupa will hold a 5.7% stake in the firm on a fully diluted basis. With this infusion, the company has so far secured Rs 485 crore in the ongoing financing round. Entrackr’s calculation shows that DailyHunt will be valued nearly Rs 4,686 crore ($625 million).

Founded as Newshunt in 2009, it was later rebranded as DailyHunt in mid-2015. It’s a news aggregation app available across vernacular languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali among others. 

Apart from India, it operates in countries including Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and some African countries. The firm was also in conversations with SoftBank to raise over $150 million but the deal didn’t go through following the Wework-SoftBank fiasco.

Recently, the Bengaluru-based firm had raised Rs 180 crore from Bytedance, Falcon Edge, Goldman Sachs and Advent Management. DailyHunt is also in early-stages talks with Alpine Capital to raise $20-25 million.

For the Murdoch family, this is the second deal in content space over the years. Five years ago, NewsCorp (owned by Rupard Murdoch at that time) had acquired VCCircle in an undisclosed amount. It also placed bets on PropTiger and GMX Service.

The incoming funds from Lupa Holdings will help DailyHunt ramp up its play against competitors at a time when content businesses are seeing a huge spike in users due to everyone staying indoors.