News In Shorts, a mobile and web based curated news platform, providing your 60-worded stories from various sources, has raised a $4 million Series A round led by Tiger Global with participation of Japan-based Rebright Partners and existing investors – Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart.
News In Shorts provides 60-word summaries of the day’s top stories from various categories including sports, entertainment, national and international news. Each summary is written by its in-house team of editors, and includes a single link out to the original story for further reading. The app already has over 100K downloads on Google Play Store.
Apart from offering app-based news platform, the company also offers a web-based, single-page layout, wherein you get short, 60-worded news from top news websites across the world. The content has been categorised into National, Business, sports, Tech, Entertainment and Miscellaneous.
Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO, News In Shorts, said,
We aim to own the mobile content space. Thousands of different forms – textual, video, audio – of content are being generated every day. We intend to make all of this content easily consumable on mobile devices.
While News In Shorts was earlier available just for the Android platform, the company just recently launched an iOS app as well. As per the company, the apps have been downloaded over 100,000 times and it seeing a rather rapid growth rate of over 10K downloads per week.
This investment into a curated news platform, further asserts investors’ rapidly growing interest into India’s burgeoning digital media scene. While India has been for IoT startups, there are still not as many news and digital content services in India as compared to the west. This is an irony, considering the fact that India’s internet population is more than the entire population of a whole lot of western countries.
Just a couple of weeks back, Newshunt, a similar news aggregation app for Android and iOS, raised a staggering $40 Million Series C round led by New York-based hedge fund Falcon Edge Capital. Newshunt is a news aggreagtion platform, sourcing digital content from various sources and putting them together in a curated fashion for its app users.
