The Hyderabad-based news website, founded in 2015 by Raju Vanapala, offers consumers short format news in eight vernacular languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam, Kannada, Bangla, and Gujrathi. It provides news in a variety of sectors, according to its LinkedIn profile, including business, sports, politics, technology, and entertainment.
The news portal company claims to have a large network of over 30,000 reporters that produce over 5000 stories each month on the site. It also claims to have over 8 billion monthly screen views and a 50 percent monthly active users to daily active users ratio.
With rising internet penetration in Tier-1, 2, and 3 cities and growing smartphone usage, India’s digital news industry has ballooned in recent years. Offline media is losing its lustre as a result of these issues, whereas digital news media is quickly gaining traction among people.
In 2021, India’s online media sector is expected to be worth more than INR 30,000 crore, according to research. By 2024, the sector is expected to increase to INR 53,700 crore.
News Aggregation Area
Way2News competes with InShorts, Dailyhunt, and Feedly in the news aggregation area. VerSe Innovations, the parent company of the vernacular news portal Dailyhunt, saw Chinese investor ByteDance depart at a 56 percent discount in June. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought ByteDance’s shares.
VerSe Innovation, Dailyhunt’s parent firm, has previously raised $805 million at a post-money valuation of $5 billion. Existing investors Sofina Group and Baillie Gifford joined the round, as did the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Luxor Capital, and Sumeru Ventures.