Apoorv Anupam
22 May 2018, India:
NewsDog has raised $50 million in Series C round of funding. the funding round was led by Tencent. Venture capital firm DHVC, Chinese VC company Legend Capital, and Dotc United Group also participated in the funding round.
NewsDog said in a statement that “it will use the round proceeds to pursue its vision of empowering individuals and professional content creators to showcase their work and reach the digital mass public. The company is adopting blockchain technology to grow faster and make the content ecosystem transparent”.
Forrest Chen, Founder and CEO, NewsDog said, “The Indian digital content industry is just getting started. Polyculture and multiple languages make content matching an incredibly hard problem. We believe that strong machine learning capabilities will be pivotal in scaling content platforms in India.”
Forrest Chen added, “So far, we have made good initial progress but content business is like an endless journey. There is no finish line, you have to just keep running.”
Yi Ma, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, NewsDog said, “After the new round of financing, the company’s expansion plans will focus on two aspects. One is to create a more dynamic content platform for users by enriching localized experience by adding more regional languages. The other is to constantly buttress our technical capabilities in order to provide users with a more personalized experience.”
Forest Lin, Managing Partner of Tencent Investments said, “NewsDog combines its leading technical capabilities with its deep pool of entertainment content to provide Indian users a personalised experience.”
Forest Lin said, “We look forward to supporting NewsDog to become India’s favourite online entertainment platform.”
NewsDog was launched by Forrest Chen and and Yi Ma in 2016.