 "Inshorts acquires Bengaluru-based Betaglide")
Inshorts – an app that feeds 60-word news summaries to users in India – has acquired Betaglide, the Bengaluru-based company behind Retention.ai which tracks app uninstalls to help improve user retention. This is the first acquisition by Inshorts – earlier named News in Shorts – which had two rounds of funding this year, both led by Tiger Global.
Inshorts is also one of the first investments in India by Japan’s Rebright Partners. A series A round of $4 million in February was followed within five months by a $20 million series B round, showing the interest of investors in mobile content distribution ideas in India.
It all started as a Facebook page
Inshorts began as a Facebook page in 2013. “As current affairs savvy people ourselves, we felt that the current media industry is designed to serve only those amongst us who have the time and patience to read through the news epics,” the founders told Tech in Asia in an earlier interview.
It rebranded itself as Inshorts as the app went beyond news to include other content streams like videos, infographics, and podcasts.
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Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO of Inshorts, dropped out of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi to found the company with his collegemate Anunay Arunav and Deepit Purkayastha, alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. Betaglide, meanwhile, is a campus start-up which sprouted out of IIT Kharagpur. Amritanshu Anand, Anshul Singhle, Manan Shah, and Abhimanyu Dikshit founded it in 2013 and moved based to Bengaluru later.
