 "Tiger Global-backed News in Shorts to offer customised contents to users")
Delhi-based news curation app News in Shorts, which recently raised $20 million in Series-B funding from Tiger Global, has expanded its offering beyond news to videos, blogs and podcasts.
The two-year start-up, incubated at Times Internet’s TLabs, has expanded from a news curation platform to a content discovery app, allowing users to access contextual content such as lifestyle, entertainment and finance.
The company has also rebranded itself as “inshorts”. With the rebranding, inshorts looks to evolve beyond news and textual content and bridge the gap between news and other forms of content.
The two-year start-up, incubated at Times Internet’s TLabs, has expanded from a news curation platform to a content discovery app, allowing users to access contextual content such as lifestyle, entertainment and finance.
The company has also rebranded itself as “inshorts”. With the rebranding, inshorts looks to evolve beyond news and textual content and bridge the gap between news and other forms of content.
“Traditionally, the perception of news has been something that a mainstream media covers. We now believe it is time for us to evolve beyond the news format,” said Deepit Purkayastha, co-founder and chief strategy officer, inshorts.
“A person can be also informed by getting to him to read other types of customised contents that are relevant to him. With in shorts, we are trying to bring in a recommendation engine to bring to him contents of his interest in an easily consumable format,” he added.
“A person can be also informed by getting to him to read other types of customised contents that are relevant to him. With in shorts, we are trying to bring in a recommendation engine to bring to him contents of his interest in an easily consumable format,” he added.
“This is in a way our first move in building inshorts a customer centric company where every user would be served content based on his/her individual preference and profile. As we go along, we would aim to make inshorts the go-to app for all kinds of curated content discovery and, thereby, saving them from the pain of downloading multiple apps for multiple purposes,” said Azhar Iqubal, chief executive officer and co-founder, inshorts.
In line with the expansion, inshorts also plans to hire 100 more content editors and and 50 technical experts to support the recommendation engine.
inshorts was founded by Iqubal and Purkayastha along with Anunay Arunav, all former IITians. The company has raised a little more than $24 million in total. Early this month, in shorts had raised about $20 million in Series-B from existing investor Tiger Global in its second round of funding this year.
In February, it had raised $4 million in Series A that was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Rebright Partners of Japan and existing angels Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal. It had raised $250,000 in seed round in June 2014.
In February, it had raised $4 million in Series A that was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Rebright Partners of Japan and existing angels Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra and Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal. It had raised $250,000 in seed round in June 2014.
The News in Shorts app had already crossed one million downloads by the first quarter of 2015 and the company expects to take it to five million soon.