News and ebooks mobile app DailyHunt has raised $25 million in a round of funding led by China-based Bytedance. Existing investors Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Falcon Edge, Omidyar and former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin also participated in the round. Bytedance is a content aggregator in China, and according to DailyHunt, the collaboration will help it with news personalization and the use of machine learning. As a part of the deal, Bytedance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming will join the DailyHunt board. DailyHunt claims to have over 28 million monthly active users (with an install base of 120 million phones) and over 4.5 billion page views monthly. According to the company, it updates with "35,000 items published daily", offering users aggregated news content, and has paid ebooks, short stories and paid-to-read magazine articles, comics and video. Its competitors include apps like InShorts and Magzter. Earlier this year, it invested Rs 15 crore in local language news website OneIndia for a minority stake, looking to generate multimedia content (short videos and audio) for its platform. Past fundraising DailyHunt had previously secured Rs 120 crore (~$18M) from Falcon Edge Capital and existing investors in February last year. It had also raised Rs 100 crore (~$15M) in a Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital India in September 2014. It’s worth noting that DailyHunt was previously NewsHunt, which was originally acquired by Ver Se’ Innovation from Rediff-backed Eterno Infotech in 2012.
