Tech news startup FactorDaily raises funds from Vijay Shekhar Sharma, others

Bengaluru-based technology news portal FactorDaily has secured Rs 5.7 crore ($875,000) in a fresh funding round from Freshworks promoter Girish Mathrubootham and existing investor Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, filings with the Registrar of Companies show.

The company’s other existing investors venture capital firms Blume Ventures and Accel Partners also participated in the round. Entrepreneur Jayaprakash Vijayan came on board as a new investor, the filings state.

The company currently has received Rs 76 lakh ($116.667) of the total funds committed to it, from Sharma and Mathrubootham. 

Operated by SourceCode Media Private Limited, FactorDaily allotted 1,714 Series A1 preference shares of Rs 10 each at a premium of Rs 4438.18 each, the filings state.

Pankaj Mishra, co-founder of FactorDaily, confirmed the development to TechCircle. However, email queries sent to Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and Vijay Shekhar Sharma did not elicit a response at the time of publishing this report.

FactorDaily was founded in 2016 by Mishra and Jayadevan PK. The platform last raised funds in 2016, when it secured $1 million in a seed funding round from Sharma, Blume and Accel.

Sharma is also an investor in two other digital media startups, The Ken, The Print and DealStreetAsia.

Deals in the digital media space
Last week, digital news portal The Print raised Rs 3.49 crore (around $5,35,000) from existing investor Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata.

Around the same time, subscription-based news startup The Ken raised around $228,000 (Rs 1.48 crore) from a group of individual investors in its second round of funding.

In February this year, Kochi-based Quadzeta Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which operates inFact, a mobile app which aggregates news and infotainment content, raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Joel George, a Saudi Arabia-based angel investor.

Last December, news curation app Inshorts had raised $5 million (Rs 32.2 crore) from existing investor Tiger Global in a bridge round of funding.

In February 2017, UC-RNT Fund, which is a joint venture between the University of California and Tata, had topped up its investment in Bengaluru-based digital media company YourStory Media Pvt. Ltd, which runs YourStory.com.

YourStory competes with a few products of The VCCircle Network.

*The article earlier mentioned Titash Neogi as a co-founder. The error has been rectified.