Gurugram-based NewsBytes, owned by Elysium Labs, yesterday, announced that it has wrapped up a Series A round of almost $1.5 million, led by North Base Media, a global venture capital firm specialising in media.  

Co-founder of NewsBytes, Sumedh Chaudhry, said that the AI-driven digital media startup will deploy the fresh funds in augmenting its technology.  

“With this capital, we are better positioned to expand our fast-growing audience and develop new technologies that will allow us to serve new clients,” he said.  

Chaudhry further added the participation by NBM, which has extensive media and media-tech experience globally, together with new investor JITO Angels and the company’s existing investor, Powerhouse Ventures, gives NewsBytes stability at a crucial time.

The 5-year-old firm had earlier secured $1 million in its pre-Series A round led by German publishing firm Mueller Medien’s investment arm MM Inno GmbH. It was incubated by GSF Accelerator in 2015 and had also received an investment of $50,000. 

Founded by Sumedh Chaudhry, Shikha Chaudhry and Romesh Khaddar, NewsBytes has developed an AI-driven content engine YANTRA, that can write factual stories without any human intervention. Notably, the engine has multilingual capacities and can tackle a vast array of categories from consumer technology to financial markets, the company claims.  

The firm is also licensing its engine to other companies looking to automate their content creation process. It has already onboarded several clients including overseas media companies. 

North Base Media, founded by the former editor of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post Marcus Brauchli and former CEO of Media Development Loan Fund Sasa Vucinic, invests in media companies working in sports, entertainment, music, business and news content. Other Indian startup in its portfolio is Mumbai-based digital entertainment content provider Pocket Aces. 

Last week, Dailyhunt, the Bengaluru-based news platform has also received $23.5 million (approximately Rs 180 crore), in a Series G funding round led by existing investors such as Falcon Edge, ByteDance, Goldman Sachs and Advent Management.