Dailyhunt, the local language news aggregator had recently kickstarted its series G funding round and raised Rs 180 crore last week. It has now been topped with Rs 267.1 crore ($35.6 million) from James Murdoch’s Lupa India. 

It’s the second investment by media mogul James Murdoch in India. Lupa backed e-learning firm Harappa Education, just four months back.

As per the regulatory filings, DailyHunt is allotting 205,523 Series G3 preference shares and 10 equity shares to Lupa India Holdings LLC at a rate of Rs 12,995.84 each share.

Once the transaction goes through, Lupa will have a 5.7 per cent stake in the firm on a fully diluted basis. With this infusion, the company has so far secured Rs 485 crore in the financing round that is in process. 

It was founded as Newshunt in 2009 and was later rebranded as DailyHunt in mid-2015. It is a news aggregation app available across vernacular languages including Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali among others. 

Apart from India, it operates in countries including Nepal, Sri Lanka Bangladesh and some African countries. The firm was also in talks with SoftBank to raise over $150 million but the deal didn’t work out following the Wework-SoftBank fiasco.

Recently, the Bengaluru-based firm had raised Rs 180 crore from Falcon Edge, Bytedance, Goldman Sachs and Advent Management. DailyHunt is also in early-stages talks with Alpine Capital to raise an amount of $20-25 million.

For the Murdoch family, it is the second deal in content space over the years. Five years ago, NewsCorp (owned by Rupard Murdoch at that time) had acquired VCCircle in an unrevealed amount. It also placed bets on GMX Service and PropTiger.

The incoming funds from Lupa Holdings will help DailyHunt ramp up its play against its competitors at a time when content businesses are seeing a huge spike in users due to the present situation of lockdown and everyone staying indoors.