How Dailyhunt became India's top news app

Dailyhunt's ascension to the top has been staggering. Tech in Asia traces its growth and explores its future trajectory

Virendra Gupta, the founder and CEO of Verse Innovation, doesn’t get much sleep. But when he does get some shut-eye, he’s probably smiling. Dailyhunt, a Flipboard-like news aggregation app targeted at Indians, is firing on all cylinders. Its growth, ever since it was acquired by Virendra’s company, has been astounding.

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Three billion monthly pageviews. And that excludes the home screen. It’s no wonder the Bengaluru-based start-up raised a $40.5 million round from illustrious investors like Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners.
 

Dailyhunt’s numbers compare favourably with leading news aggregation app Flipboard, which had 2.5 billion monthly pageviews in 2014 but over 80 million monthly active users compared to Dailyhunt’s 22 million.
 

 

Dailyhunt has scored well not just among smartphone users in India. At the time of writing, it’s the number one news app in 19 countries, and top ten in five more, according to mobile analytics firm App Annie. These countries range from Asia to the Middle East, South America, and Eastern Europe.
 

Formerly called Newshunt, Dailyhunt was created by ex-Nokia employees Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni in 2009. It arose at the right time in the right place, quietly gaining prominence in India as an app on Symbian (the operating system for Nokia phones). It gained 18 million monthly pageviews in two years.
 

Gaining an early lead and the favor of app store curators was just part of the story. More importantly, Dailyhunt’s creators took advantage of a key insight about India.
 

It rightly believed that India wasn’t, and still isn’t, a predominantly English-speaking market. “The next 400 million mobile internet users will be local language users,” says Virendra.

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.