Dailyhunt enters the unicorn club with $100 Mn round from Google, Microsoft and others

Local language news aggregator Dailyhunt has raised around $100 million in a fresh round from Google, Microsoft and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation. The Bengaluru-based company’s existing backers Sofina Group and Lupa Systems also participated in the round.

According to Dailyhunt, it has crossed the $1 billion valuation mark and entered the unicorn club.

The fresh proceeds will be utilised to scale up Dailyhunt’s short video app Josh and develop its content creator ecosystem. It also plans to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to scale up its short video app. Josh was launched soon after the ban on TikTok by the Indian government on June 29.

Since TikTok’s ban, Josh has been able to grab a significant market share in the short video sharing segment. Currently, it claims to have more than 77 million monthly active users, 36 million daily active users with over 1.5 billion video plays daily. 

It’s worth noting that Josh was the most downloaded short video app among homegrown companies during the October-November period. According to data sourced from Sensor Tower, Josh was downloaded more than 12 million times followed by Moj’s 8.14 million and MX TakaTak’s 6.9 million between October 23 and November 22.

The funding round announcement by Dailyhunt comes a month after it raised around $10 million from B Capital. According to an ET report, the company had also started restructuring its operations to meet the government compliance of FDI cap for digital media companies.

Two months ago, the Indian government had clarified that digital media entities need to cap foreign investment at 26% by October 2021.

Founded as Newshunt in 2009, the company was later rebranded as Dailyhunt in 2015. The content aggregation app is available across vernacular languages including Marathi, Gujarati, Nepali, among others. Dailyhunt further claims that it has more than 300 million users across its various apps and a network of over 100,000 content partners and individual content creators.

Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India and Goldman Sachs are the other key investors in Dailyhunt.