Umang Bedi Joins Dailyhunt as President

India – Feb 15th, 2018 – Verse Innovation Private Limited, creators of Dailyhunt, announced the prominent appointment of Umang Bedi as its President.

The move comes in the wake of Dailyhunt's emergence as India's undisputed leader in news and regional language content. Dailyhunt relies on a proprietary algorithm powered by Deep Learning and Machine Learning to deliver personalised, intuitive, smart curated content. 80 million users spend over 6 billion minutes on Dailyhunt each month. The platform offers over 250,000 news articles in 14 languages licensed from thousands of content partners and contributors every day. It provides original video content in Hindi and Telugu, free live television streaming service with 130+ channels across 9 languages through a strategic partnership with Vuclip and YuppTV, market leaders in the over-the-top (OTT) video content space. Dailyhunt's latest offering comes in the form of Newzly, a news excerpt mobile application that provides user customised trending headlines, also in 9 languages.

A study by KPMG and Google titled ‘Indian languages Defining India’s Internet’ highlights that by 2021, regional language users will account for 75% of India’s Internet user base. 90% of the new internet users in India in the next 5 years will be Indian language users growing by 230% to 536 million users in 2021. Vernacular Indian languages are redefining the Internet landscape by transforming the lingual face of Digital India. Dailyhunt is leading the transformation and enjoys the #1 position in this exciting market. Dailyhunt's investors include Matrix Partners India, Sequoia, Omidyar Network, Falcon Edge and Bytedance.

Umang Bedi recently concluded a successful tenure as the Managing Director of Facebook for India and South Asia. His contributions were instrumental in India emerging as amongst the largest markets for Facebook globally. The Harvard Business School Alumnus, reported for being a change agent is a sought-after name for his ability to scale businesses. Having led global enterprises such as Adobe, Intuit, Symantec in India and South Asia, Umang has championed collaborative cross-functional management. He has been the recipient of coveted awards including - Fortune India 40 Under 40, GQ's 50 Most Influential Young Indians and 40 Under 40 by the Economic Times.

Umang Bedi said; “This is a tremendous opportunity to drive scale via Dailyhunt’s ‘Made in India’ platform. The intention is to serve the unmet, under-served needs of Indians who live in tier 2,3,4 cities and rural areas and provide them with personalised, relevant, meaningful experiences. With skin in the game in this truly entrepreneurial undertaking, one has a heightened sense of responsibility, and the challenge is exhilarating. I believe Dailyhunt can differentiate to win market share in the advertising space and be an independent platform of scale.”. He concluded by stating, "Dailyhunt will become India's tool of social inclusion by bridging the digital divide, enriching and serving aspirations of a billion people and I look forward to working closely with Viru and the team, leading Dailyhunt to become a truly large scale valuable company.”

Virendra Gupta, Founder of Dailyhunt said, "We are seeing unprecedented growth in time spent for truly local content across text, images and video. Dailyhunt has already achieved substantial impact and our ambition is to consolidate our leadership position in local language content & advertising and exponentially scale this leading platform. Umang’s background in social media content and experience leading scaled teams generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues is a great fit with our plans. I welcome him on board and look forward to partnering closely with him on our journey going forward.”