Mobile content application NewsHunt (Ver Se Innovations) has announced a fund raising of Rs 100 crores, in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Matrix Partners India and Omidyar Network also participating. We weren't aware of Omidyar Networks' previous investment in Newshunt. Newshunt claims to deliver 1.5 billion pageviews on its app daily, and has over 14 million monthly active users. Almost every main publisher in India is on NewsHunt, which monetizes through mobile advertising and purchases: the company has recently entered the ebooks and magazine singles market, integrating a payment gateway allowing viewers to pay for content using carrier billing, and claims that over 4 million local language ebooks have been downloaded in the past six months alone. For an ebooks business, that's a massive. What's important here is that the company has great synergy with another business it launched: the iPayy carrier billing platform, which is being used by Newshunt for its content, as well as third party developers. In all of this, lets not forget a few things about Ver Se: - NewsHunt wasn't founded by Ver Se. It was acquired by them from Rediff backed Eterno Infotech in 2012. Founded by Chandrashekhar Sohoni, I remember the company having a ridiculously simple, two page contract for bringing publishers on board, with virtually no lock in. Rediff lost that opportunity, among a several others. That said, Ver Se built upon the platform they acquired and integrated the iPayy payments solution that it had, via…
