VerSe Innovation, the parent company of Indian news aggregator app Dailyhunt, has acquired popular digital newsstand platform Magzter, the two companies said on Thursday.
Bangalore-based VerSe did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Magzter, which is headquartered in New York, counts Singapore Press Holdings among its backers.
The acquisition of Magzter, which offers more than 8,500 magazine titles on its eponymous app, underscores VerSe’s growing focus on reaching and serving affluent audiences, VerSe co-founder Umang Bedi told TechCrunch. He called the deal Verse’s biggest acquisition to date.
Magzter has amassed over 1 million paying subscribers in India and has a global active user base of 87 million, Bedi said. The company, which offers an all-you-can-consume model with annual subscriptions ranging from $20 to $30, has found a distribution and technology partner in VerSe, he added.
Dailyhunt, which is valued at $5 billion and is backed by CPP Investments, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, Qatar Investment Authority, Carlyle Group and Goldman Sachs, began evaluating the Magzter deal last year. The Indian company plans to launch Dailyhunt Premium this year, which will include an ad-free experience as well as Magzter’s catalog. Magzter will continue to operate as a standalone service, Bedi said.
Magzter maintains partnerships with thousands of major publishers and offers titles such as The New Yorker, The Economist, Vanity Fair and Time. DailyHunt is working to introduce a personalized news feed on Magzter that will curate articles and stories from the digital newsstand app’s catalog of magazine titles.
“This partnership breaks new ground in delivering high-quality content experiences to users across India, furthering our goal of providing unparalleled digital reading experiences to our readers,” Magzter founders Girish Ramdas and Vijayakumar said in a joint statement. Radhakrishnan. They will continue to work at Magzter after the acquisition, Bedi said.
VerSe, which also runs short video app Josh, is increasingly improving its financials and expects to be EBITDA profitable at the group level by next year, Bedi said. The startup had also partnered with local social networking startup Koo for an acquisition, TechCrunch reported in February.
Bedi, declining to comment on any specific talks, claimed that VerSe is focused on deals with companies that are doing well financially and growing revenue.
