Tencent leads $50M investment in NewsDog, an app vying to be India’

Tencent leads $50M investment in NewsDog, an app vying to be India’s Toutiao

The growth of China’s Bytedance, Associate in Nursing bold $30 billion technical school firm, and its extremely addictive Toutiao news person app has gone away a pursuit for services with similar growth potential across the globe.

India, second in population solely to China with speedily growing net access, is an apparent place to appear, and would-be pretender to the Toutiao crown has been found within the form of NewsDog, a Chinese company that discovered success in Bharat. Today, NewsDog proclaimed a $50 million Series C spherical LED by Chinese net large Tencent.

Toutiao may be a development in China. The app has around two hundred million daily users, and it's in an exceedinglyll|one amongst|one in every of} the few new technical school product to emerge in a China wherever Tencent and Alibaba dominate the patron app landscape. purpose just in case, it's thus thought currently that it's even run into problems with China’s net censors. Youtiao is basically a news aggregation service that lets shoppers catch their daily reads and find out stories with Associate in Nursing expertise tailored to their habits and likes.

That’s a great deal the fashion of NewsDog, that claims over fifty million users. The service has branched dead set cowl ten of Indians several languages, whereas it recently established a platform — ‘WeMedia’ — that augments its content aggregation by permitting users to submit stories, too.

This spherical may be a major milestone for the corporate. in a very competitive atmosphere, it's the most important fundraising spherical from a news app company in Bharat whereas it a lot of clearly brings Tencent, the $500 billion technical school large, on board with its expertise and support. different investors embody Chinese VCs Danhua Capital (DHVC) and Legend Capital likewise as Chinese mobile app firm DotC United.

NewsDog’s competition includes Daily hunt — that is backed by Toutiao-owner Bytedance — In shorts, that counts Tiger world among its investors, and NewsPoint, that is owned by media firm Times net.

One different competition is UC News, a service from Alibaba-owned UC net, which, like NewsDog, is Chinese.

NewsDog was launched in 2016 by business executive Forrest bird genus Yukun, an engineering graduate from Tsinghua University graduate, and Yi Ma, WHO holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton and antecedently worked at Baidu and syndicalist Sachs.

Data from App Annie shows that NewsDog is that the high news app within the Google Play Store in Bharat — the robot is that the country’s dominant software — before Daily hunt and NewsPoint in second and third, severally. in line with detector Tower, another app transfer analytics service, the app has forty-three million installs and its downloads grew seventy-six p.c year-on-year within the half-moon of the year.

NewsDog plans to use this new funding to tug more before the competition by that specializes in adding a lot of languages and deepening its content library.

The company same it's already exploitation machine learning to assist manufacture Associate in Nursing expertise that's bespoke to users — the expertise that Toutiao pioneered in China — and it plans to double down thereon.

“Polyculture Associate in Nursing multiple languages build content matching an improbably laborious downside,” bird genus same in a very statement. “So far, we've got created sensible initial progress, however, content business is like Associate in Nursing endless journey. there's no destination, you have got to simply keep running.”

NewsDog is progressing to reach a hundred million users as its next milestone as India’s net population surges. The country is tipped to achieve five hundred million net users by June 2018, in line with a report from the net and Mobile Association of Bharat (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB. That’s up from 481 million six months previous, however net penetration in rural areas is at simply twenty p.c compared with sixty-five p.c in urban Bharat that indicates even a lot of growth potential.

For Tencent, meanwhile, this investment is another upping of its pace in Bharat.

Initially, the corporate was slow to place cash to figure in Bharat, wherever Alibaba entered early to shop for stakes within the likes of Paytm, however, step by step Tencent has its record out. Its most notable India-based deals embody WhatsApp contender Hike, care platform Practo, and music service Gaana. This year, it's reported that specialize in finding promising early-stage startups wherever it will invest $5-15 million.

In NewsDog, Tencent can hope to leap on the news person train that it lost in China, giving Bytedance a chance to become a significant Chinese shopper whole.