Content Distributor App, Inshorts Makes Its First Acquisition; Acquires Bangalore Based BetaGlide

Content distributor app Inshorts has acquired Palo Alto/Bangalore based startup, BetaGlide, the company behind Retention.ai which helps app developers track uninstalled users, draw insights on user experience and improve user retention.

It primarily works on tracking uninstalled users, which includes finding probable reasons for uninstallation, thereby resulting in decreased user acquisition cost. Thus, it helps app developers track uninstalled users, draw insights on user experience and improve user retention.

“We are looking to build an in-house analytics engine to personalise content delivery and increase the app’s retention,” said Amritanshu Anand, an IIT-Kharagpur alumnus. Anand co-founded BetaGlide along with three other, Anshul Singhle, Manan Shah and Abhimanyu Dikshit in 2013. Since then, it has worked with more than 12.5 Mn devices.

BetaGlide had earlier raised Series A funding from Mercury fund, with participation from angel investors like Anshu Sharma (Ex-VP, Salesforce, Venture Partner Storm Ventures), Pratyush Prasanna (Ex-VP, PayTM) and Punit Soni (Chief Product Officer, Flipkart). The company was also part of TLabs Accelerator.

Azhar Iqubal, co-founder of Inshorts stated, “The acquisition will be helpful in improving mobile experience for customers.” With the acquisition, Inshorts aims to move a step ahead in delivering the best content consumption experience. Additionally, it aims to move a step ahead in retention as the company plans to roll-out features such as the recommendation engine. Retention.ai had previously worked with Inshorts to provide their developers with app usability data that helped detect performance, functional issues and bugs, even for low-end smartphones.

Iqubal co-founded Inshorts with IIT graduates Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav in 2013. Besides proving aggregated news items, Inshorts now also incorporates videos, infographics, podcasts and blogs among other things, thus evolving from being a news aggregator to a content discovery platform. In July this year, it raised $20Mn (INR 127 Cr.) from existing investor Tiger Global Management. The company plans to reach 5 Mn app downloads by the end of 2015, and hire about 100+ content writers by end of the year to establish a mobile content powerhouse in India.

Another notable player in the segment is the local language news story mobile app, Newshunt, now called Dailyhunt, which had acquired a product discovery and recommendation platform, Buyt.in for an undisclosed amount this July.

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