Newshunt, India's local language mobile news aggregation service has announced its Series C funding of INR 120 crore (US$19.4 million) led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital and this brings the NewsHunt's total funding raised to date to US$40.4M. The funding will be used to build a stronger local language platform.
Existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, and Omidyar Network also participated in this round. In September 2014, Newshunt had raised its Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.
Developed by Bangalore-based Eterno Infotech Private Limited, NewsHunt aggregates news stories from a wide range of national, international, and regional sources - more than 100 publications. It serves more than 25,000 articles a day (1.7 billion pages a month). The app works on all platforms and devices including J2ME, Symbian, Blackberry, Android & iOS and has been downloaded more than 75 million times.
After this funding the company's valuation has reached between Rs 1,700 to 1,800 crore.
Users pay for downloads through Newshunt’s proprietary payment platform iPayy that is now also being used by third party developers for micro-transactions through carrier billing.
"The next 500 million mobile Internet users that will emerge in India will largely be local language first – they will create and consume content and services in local languages. Our vision is to be a dominant part of their first Internet experience and serve these users with world-class products starting with Newshunt, eBooks, iPayy and many more to come." said said Virendra Gupta, founder and CEO of NewsHunt.
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