Dailyhunt acquires Local Play

Bengaluru based news and ebooks mobile app, Dailyhunt has acquired Bengaluru based hyperlocal video content and news content application, Local Play for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2018 by Gunjan Kejriwal and Prajwal P, LocalPlay has done significant process and product innovation for on ground news collection and production. LocalPlay had raised a seed round from Orios Venture Partners, Raveen Sastry, Sanjay Ramakrishnan, Dhimant Parekh, N Ravi Shankar and Gopinath G.

Launched in 2009 by Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, NewsHunt was acquired by Verse in 2012. In August 2015 NewsHunt rebranded itself as DailyHunt. Currently, Dailyhunt has grown into a news and local language content application with over 155 Mn app installs offering 100K news articles in 14 languages licensed from over 800 publication partners every day. The group claims that every month has more than 50 Mn users spend over six billion minutes on the app.

The company has raised more than $122.3 Mn (INR 870 Cr) in series of investments from investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge Capital, Matrix Partners, Omidyar Network, and Darby Overseas Investments. Going forward, Dailyhunt will further scale up and produce 5 Mn pieces of hyperlocal content annually, available exclusively on Dailyhunt.

NewsHunt acquires BuyT

India’s local language mobile platform NewsHunt has acquired Rocket Science Innovations Private Limited, the parent company of the ecommerce recommendation platform BuyT ContentLink. BuyT will run as a standalone unit. It will continue its existing line of business enabling commerce for NewsHunt users.

Founded in 2012, ContentLink enables the information flow from a merchant/service provider to the consumer. The platform has integrated content with commerce by making product recommendation available at the point of consumer research on leading publisher platform. The platform parses real-time all major commerce sites in India for product updates and on the other end, analyzes context and user behavior on content pages and offers a rich ecommerce experience.

The New-Delhi based startup will be focusing on building the next generation platform for NewsHunt which plans to integrate shopping and commerce options for local language users on the NewsHunt platform. BuyT main focus is on mcommerce and they have also launched their app SDK.

NewsHunt claims to have over 20 Million monthly active users and over 2.5 Billion page views monthly. The company has created a vibrant marketplace for publishers with over 15 Million local language eBooks downloaded in the past 6 months. Almost two years, the company had launched iPayy, a micro transaction platform based on carrier billing. The platform has access to 700M subscribers across 5 major telcos in India and currently used by 700 digital goods merchants.