Verified employee & interview reviews

Dailyhunt Reviews

Bengaluru, Karnataka

5.0/ 5

1 review

Dailyhunt, originally launched as Newshunt in 2009 by former Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni, is a leading Indian content and news aggregator application. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Karnataka, the platform underwent a major transformation after its acquisition in 2011 by Virendra Gupta, the founder of VerSe Innovation. In 2015, the application was rebranded as Dailyhunt, and in 2018, Umang Bedi joined the leadership team, later becoming a co-founder in 2020 alongside Gupta and Shailendra Sharma. Under its parent organization, VerSe Innovation, Dailyhunt has evolved into a prominent local language digital media platform. The core product operates as a mobile application and content discovery platform designed to bridge India's digital divide by providing personalized news, entertainment, and media content. Recognizing that a vast majority of new internet users in India prefer non-English media, Dailyhunt focuses heavily on regional markets, offering content in over 14 to 16 native Indian languages, including Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi. The platform's proprietary machine learning and deep learning algorithms track user preferences through vertical search and recommendation tools, delivering highly personalized news feeds and real-time notifications curated from more than 3,000 publishers and hyperlocal correspondents. In addition to textual articles, magazines, and e-newspapers, the application offers short-form video content and podcasts to maximize user engagement. Operating at a petabyte scale, Dailyhunt manages its infrastructure using a hybrid cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) and leverages advanced analytics tools like Google Cloud's BigQuery to monitor performance, latency, and buffer times in real time. This ensures a low-latency user experience for its substantial user base, which exceeds 350 million monthly active users across Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 cities. Financially, Dailyhunt operates as a private entity under VerSe Innovation. On December 21, 2020, it became India's first tech unicorn focused on local language content following a funding round led by major global technology companies, including Google and Microsoft. Over its operational history, the parent company has raised over $1.7 billion from high-profile investors such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Sequoia Capital India, ByteDance, Goldman Sachs, Falcon Edge Capital, and Alteria Capital, reaching a valuation of approximately $5 billion. To expand its digital ecosystem, Dailyhunt and its parent company have completed several strategic mergers and acquisitions, including the purchase of the local photo-sharing app Vebbler, AI solutions provider Cognirel Technologies, the global digital magazine platform Magzter, and the hyperlocal video application LocalPlay. Dailyhunt also features a dedicated ad platform tailored for brands and advertisers seeking to target regional audiences using image banners, native text, and video ads in native language environments.