News In Shorts, the popular Tiger Global-backed news digest app which provides top news of the day in about 60 words, has announced fresh funding round of a whopping $20 million from existing investor Tiger Global Management.
While confirming about the new funding round, the company has not revealed any information about the amount of investment or the valuation of the company.
The company was started in September 2014 by Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Pandey. News in Shorts was a part of the fourth batch of Times Internet’s accelerator TLabs in 2013. It has a team of around 30 people, which it plans to expand to 50 people by the year end at its new office.
It provides its target audience with 60-word summaries of the top stories, spanning across range of categories including sports, entertainment, national and international news. The app, which has seen downloads ranging between 1 Million to 5 Million on Play Store, had earlier grabbed a $4 Million round from Tiger Global for team expansion.
The 60-word summary in the app is written by a team of its in-house of editors, who pick up and curate stories from multiple news sources across the web. These stories include a link out to a story with further information, while readers can opt in for push notifications.
With fresh capital coming in , News in Shorts is speculated to be valued anywhere between $90 Million – $100 Million, that being achieved within just an year of operations.
However, whats interesting though, is the fact that News in Shorts has no plans for monetisation in the near future, thus indicating how investors might be willing to further support growth and not look for revenue as of now. It will make money through sponsored content and native advertising.
Since December 2014, News in Shorts has seen Android app downloads increase over 10 times from 100,000 to over one million now. Now, the company aims to cross the five million downloads mark by the end of this year.
Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO of the company, said,
“The only focus that we have right now is to make sure that the app runs smoothly on lower-end smartphones as well. We will reach five million downloads by the end of 2015, and hopefully also cross the 10 million mark by then.”
While there are multitude of news aggregator apps currently available in the market, News in Shorts’ crisp, 60-worded summaries is what makes them distinct and popular. However, more global news aggregator apps like Flipboard, News Republic could give stiff competition to the Indian startup, largely on design and usability front
