Franklin PE arm exits Dailyhunt, clocking over 3-fold return

BENGALURU: Franklin Templeton Private Equity Strategy, an investment fund managed by Darby, has exited Dailyhunt, clocking over threefold returns by selling its stake to Chinese content aggregator Bytedance.

The PE firm has sold its stake in Ver Se Innovation, which owns vernacular news platform Dailyhunt, for about Rs 130 crore in a secondary transaction, according to three sources familiar with the development.

Bytedance, which is backed by investors like Russian billionaire Yuri Miliner's DST Global and Chinese social media major Sina Weibo, invested about Rs 168 crore as fresh capital in Dailyhunt in October this year. The Bengaluru-based company also counts Matrix Partners India, Sequoia Capital India and Omidyar Network besides former global CEO of Vodafone Group Arun Sarin as investors.

The new round of funding has valued Dailyhunt at about Rs 2,100 crore, a slight premium to its previous round valuation of Rs 1,700-Rs 1,800 crore, according to Registrar of Corporate Affairs filings reviewed by ET.

Email sent to Dailyhunt founder Virendra Gupta and Franklin Templeton did not elicit a response at the time of filing this article.

Bringing Bytedance on board is expected to help Dailyhunt with experience of how to expand the business. Bytedance has 140 million monthly active users across its portal Jinri Toutiao in China and Top-Buzz in US and Brazil.

According to reports, it was valued over $500 million in 2014 and is pegged as the next multi-billion dollar valuation startup after cab-hailing app Didi Chuxing and group deals site Meituan.

The Bengaluru-based company has an annual revenue rate of over Rs 100 crore and aims to go over Rs 1,500 crore in the next four years, by capturing 6-7% of the $4-billion digital advertising market.

Besides advertising on the platform, it also earns revenue by selling ebooks and payments. Dailyhunt has already built a sizable user base with over 120 million mobile application downloads and 28 million monthly active users who read 4.5 billion pages. In the next four years, it expects monthly active users on the platform to increase to 150-200 million.