NewsBytes

About NewsBytes

NewsBytes is an artificial-intelligence-powered digital news platform headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, that publishes concise, contextual news across politics, business, technology, entertainment and sport through its website and mobile applications. Founded in 2015 by three technologists — Sumedh Chaudhry, Romesh Khaddar and Shikha Chaudhry — it was conceived as India's first AI-driven news platform, built around a proprietary content engine called YANTRA that can draft factual news stories with minimal human intervention. The company is owned by Elysium Labs Private Limited and operates two businesses in parallel: a consumer-facing news platform and a business-to-business technology arm that licenses its content engine to other companies. Its official website is newsbytesapp.com.

Founding by three technologists

NewsBytes was founded in 2015 by Sumedh Chaudhry, Romesh Khaddar and Shikha Chaudhry, three technology professionals who set out to address what they saw as the central problem of digital news consumption: readers drowning in information but starved of context. The founders argued that many people were not up to date with current affairs not from unwillingness to read, but because news pieces routinely lacked the background information needed to understand a story. Their stated goal was that a reader should get a thorough picture of any story within a minute of opening the app or website.

The startup was incubated by GSF Accelerator in 2015 and received an initial investment of $50,000, placing it among the early Indian media startups to emerge from a technology accelerator rather than a journalism background. That origin shaped the company's DNA: from the beginning it described itself as a media technology company first, with journalism as one application of its technology, a framing that set it apart from the digital arms of legacy newsrooms.

The YANTRA content engine

At the heart of NewsBytes is YANTRA, its AI-driven content engine, which the company says can write factual stories with almost zero human intervention. The engine has multilingual capabilities and can handle a wide array of categories, from consumer technology launches to financial market movements — the kinds of formula-driven, data-heavy stories where the facts are structured and the narrative pattern is repeatable. A match report, a quarterly earnings story or a smartphone launch article are the canonical examples of what the engine is built to produce.

The founders have been careful to position the technology as an aid to journalists rather than a replacement for them. Co-founder Sumedh Chaudhry has said the engine cannot write stories that require human empathy or emotion, and that the idea is to give journalists ammunition to support their work rather than to eliminate their jobs. The distinction reflects a realistic assessment of automated journalism's limits: YANTRA handles the factual, high-volume content that newsrooms must produce because it has to be produced, freeing human writers for reporting and analysis that require judgment.

Concise, contextual news format

The consumer product is built around short, structured news items that integrate relevant background information directly into each story. Where a conventional news brief might report an event in isolation, a NewsBytes item is designed to carry the context — the backstory, the key figures, the timeline — that lets a reader understand why the event matters. The format was a deliberate response to the decline in readers' attention spans and the shift toward mobile and social news consumption that the founders identified at launch.

The platform covers India news, business, politics, world affairs, technology, Bollywood and cricket, among other categories. The emphasis on brevity with context was aimed particularly at younger, mobile-first readers who encounter news on messaging apps and social feeds, where a long article is unlikely to be read but a well-structured summary with background can genuinely inform. The company has described its mission as solving the media market's core production problem: creating good-quality content across formats with minimal human intervention.

Two businesses: media and technology

NewsBytes describes itself as an amalgamation of two companies. One is the consumer-facing media platform that leverages the content engine to produce news for readers; the other is a business-to-business technology company that licenses YANTRA to other organisations that need factual content at scale. The B2B arm was an early strategic bet that the engine's value extended beyond the company's own newsroom — any business that needs to generate structured factual content, from e-commerce to financial services, is a potential customer.

The company has said it onboarded clients for the engine both in India and overseas, including foreign media companies, and that it was working on using AI to generate products beyond news. The dual model gave NewsBytes a hedge that pure-play digital news startups lacked: if advertising-funded consumer news proved difficult to monetise, the technology licensing business offered a separate revenue stream built on the same underlying asset.

Funding history

NewsBytes raised a pre-Series A round of $1 million in September 2018, led by the investment arm of the German publishing firm Mueller Medien, MM Inno GmbH. The round validated the company's media-technology positioning in the eyes of a traditional European publisher willing to bet on automated news production. The company then closed a Series A round of almost $1.5 million in April 2020, led by North Base Media, a US-based venture capital firm specialising in media, with participation from new investor JITO Angels and existing investor Powerhouse Ventures.

Across its funding history the company has raised more than $2.5 million over five rounds, according to startup databases, with backers also including Mumbai Angels and GSF India. The Series A capital was earmarked for expanding the audience and developing new technologies to serve licensing clients. Inc42's company database records the firm's revenue at ₹9.3 crore in FY25, up from ₹8.2 crore in FY24, and puts its headcount at around 59 employees — the profile of a lean, technology-driven operation rather than a large newsroom.

Audience and reach

At the time of its Series A in 2020, the company said its consumer news vertical was reaching about 13 million monthly unique users, a substantial audience for an independent digital news startup. The readership skewed toward the mobile-first, English-reading Indian audience interested in crisp news summaries across categories from technology to markets. The platform's app and website were designed to serve readers who wanted to stay informed without committing to long reading sessions.

The multilingual capabilities of the YANTRA engine were central to the company's growth thesis: the same story could be produced in multiple languages with minimal additional cost, opening the possibility of serving India's vast vernacular audiences without building large language newsrooms. The company has described multilingual, AI-assisted content creation as its core differentiator, and its LinkedIn profile presents it as India's only media technology company able to create content in multiple languages using an AI-powered engine.

Multilingual and multi-format ambitions

From its early years NewsBytes emphasised that its engine could produce content across media formats and languages, a claim that anticipated the industry's later scramble for vernacular and video content. The company's public materials describe solving the problem of producing good-quality content across media formats with minimal human intervention — a formulation that covers text, and by extension the structured data that feeds video scripts, social cards and other derivatives.

The multi-format ambition reflected the founders' reading of where news consumption was heading: toward short, visual, platform-native formats rather than the article as the atomic unit of news. By building the engine to generate structured factual content, the company positioned itself to feed whatever formats emerged, from app notifications to automated video, without rebuilding its production pipeline each time.

Editorial philosophy

NewsBytes' editorial philosophy flows from its technological premise: that the scarcest resource in news is not information but understanding, and that journalism's job is to close the gap. The platform's signature move — embedding background and context into short items — is an editorial choice as much as a product feature, reflecting the founders' belief that readers fail to follow the news because stories assume knowledge they don't have.

The company's stance on automation in the newsroom has been consistently pragmatic rather than utopian. It does not claim that AI can do journalism; it claims that AI can do the parts of journalism that are mechanical, at scale and in multiple languages, and that doing so makes human journalism more valuable rather than less. That argument — augmentation rather than replacement — has become the industry consensus in the years since, but NewsBytes was making it from 2015.

Place in Indian media technology

NewsBytes was among the first Indian startups to treat news production as an engineering problem, predating the generative-AI wave by the better part of a decade. Its recognition in YourStory's Tech30 cohort in 2019 marked its arrival as a notable media-technology company, and its funding from a global media-focused investor in North Base Media signalled that the model had international credibility. In a market where most digital news innovation came from the legacy press moving online, NewsBytes represented the opposite direction: a technology company moving into news.

The company's B2B licensing model also foreshadowed a broader trend, as media houses worldwide began licensing or building AI tools for content production in the 2020s. NewsBytes' early bet — that the engine was the business and the newsroom was the demonstration — looks prescient in retrospect, even as the competitive landscape for AI content tools has grown far more crowded than it was in 2015.

Outlook

As of October 2026, NewsBytes continues to operate its AI-assisted news platform from Gurugram, serving readers through its website and apps while developing its content-licensing business. The company's long-term prospects rest on the same two pillars it started with: a consumer product that makes news genuinely comprehensible in minimal time, and a technology engine whose multilingual, multi-format capabilities become more valuable as automated content production goes mainstream. In a media environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the startup that set out in 2015 to be India's first AI-powered news platform finds its founding thesis more relevant than ever.