Noida-based, News in Shorts, has been rechristened as “inshorts”. Post the rebranding, application will evolve from being a news aggregator to a content discovery platform.
Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav, three IIT dropout started News In Shorts as a Facebook page in April 2013. The 60 word summary format of serving aggregated news items made the app a hit and inshorts will also stick to that format to aggregate newer content categories. Users will now receive a broad spectrum of content streams like videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs and others that will make user-experience all the more exciting.
Commenting on this move, company says, “Our goal is to make inshorts the one stop shop for a variety of curated content discovery and thereby saving the consumer from the hassle of using and downloading multiple apps. Also, we are trying to bring in a recommendation engine to bring to the user content of his interest in an easily consumable format.”
As per the company, it has garnered around 2Mn downloads by now and estimates to reach 5Mn by the end of 2015.
Company’s future plans include hiring of about 100+ content writers by end of 2015 and thus, to establish a mobile content powerhouse in India.
“As an aggregator of 3rd party content, inshorts are an enabler for content publishers and a competition for none,” said the company.
Company was a part of fourth batch of Times Internet’s startup accelerator TLabs, and had raised $15k against 10% equity.
In 2014, they had raised an undisclosed amount in funding from Times Internet, Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal; Gaurav Bhatnagar, Ankush Nijhawan and Manish Dhingra in seed round and a further sum of $4Mn in a new funding round led by Tiger Global, and other investors including Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal and Japan’s Rebright Partners. Followed by another round of funding from existing investor Tiger Global Management leading an investment of $20Mn.
Earlier this month, The local language news story mobile app, Newshunt acquired a product discovery and recommendation platform, Buyt.in for an undisclosed amount.
