Fascinating short form news reporting startup News in Shorts raises $4 million Series A
Short form news startup News in Shorts has raised $4 million Series A in a round led by Tiger Global Management that included Lee Fixel, Rebright Partners, Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal.
News is Shorts, despite its name, doesn’t imply that the founders aren’t wearing long pants versus offering a fascinating, primarily mobile app-focused startup that delivers the latest news stories is 60 words of less.
Founded in 2013 and based in New Dehli, the team aims to offer “short and crisp news within 60 words to update you in minutes.” The team roughly pump out 60 updates a day at 60 words across a range of news stories covering sports, entertainment, national and international news.
“We aim to own the mobile content space. Thousands of different forms textual, video and audio content are being generated everyday. We intend to make all of this content easily consumable on mobile devices,” Co-founder and CEO Azhar Iqubal told e27.com.
Their app of the same name is currently showing 100,000-500,000 downloads on Google’s Android Play Store with a 4.5 star rating, and launched on Apple’s App Store Sunday.
“Mobile content is ripe for disruption, and the NIS team understands the opportunities very well. We believe they can revolutionise the way content is being consumed on mobile devices. The 60-word news ‘shorts’ is just a step towards that goal,” Lee Fixel of Tiger Global told e27.com
It’s an interesting concept. If you throw a net wide you can compare the offering in part to everyone to Yahoo’s News Digest app, through to Circa, NewsHunt and perhaps in part even more recently Snapchat’s new news lite app offering, but none are quite the same.
Although it has launched with a focus on its native India, the news offering is in English and even if you are a serious news junky you can see the appeal: lots of short form news, complete with the key facts, that is easy to digest in short shrift.
Perhaps it’s an evolution in the space that a company that offers brevity of in-depth news can attract funding like this in 2015, but it also reflects a market where the mainstream is often switching off to long form news (well, unless it’s described by 10 or more animated gifs, ala Buzzfeed) and where a startup like this can potentially find strong market share.
News in Shorts said the funds will be used to expand the team, and to work on personalisation and customisation. A portion of the funds will also be put towards introducing video streaming.
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