Dailyhunt takes challenge to tech giants
Former Facebook India head Umang Bedi has a vision for Bharat. Bedi and Viru Gupta, co-founders of start-up Dailyhunt, are building a family of apps and aim to make it the largest platform for regional language users, bigger than Facebook and Google.
The company wants to reach a billion users through its ‘made in India’ apps by financial year 202425 (FY25).
While Dailyhunt is already fulfilling the need for news content and infotainment with 283 million monthly active users on the platform, as claimed by the company, the Sequoia Capital-backed start-up has rolled out a short video app called Josh as it seeks to fill in the void left by Tiktok, which was banned in June. Interestingly, Bytedance, the developer of Tiktok, is also an investor in Dailyhunt. The company has raised over $200 million so far from investors such as Matrix Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Bytedance, Falcon Edge, and Goldman Sachs.
“This is the start of our family of apps, which will be built on the
common AI-ML learning local language tech stack that’s running the Dailyhunt app. We want to take away more than 2.5 hours every day across our family of apps for the local language user,” says Bedi, who came on board in 2018.
Bedi who had one of the best paying jobs in the technology sector in India felt something was amiss as he was not really creating products for end consumers. “So, I decided to transform my life by leaving everything that I prided about behind. My biggest mistake is not doing it 10 years earlier with Viru (Gupta),” says Bedi, who also served as Adobe MD for South Asia for over 5 years.
At Facebook, Bedi learnt about scaling, efficiency and value of monetisation, the pillars around which his team has modelled Dailyhunt. Gupta says Bedi has also brought in the courage to take on Facebook. The company rolled out the beta version of its Josh app within two weeks of the Tiktok ban. The team leveraged the opportunity by building Josh on the company’s tech stack, which has several years of R&D work behind it, and utilised its content partner ecosystem for the roll-out.