News-Aggregation time folks ! Hotify, a personalised news aggregation app, which claims to be using machine learning to aggregate news for you, has raised a $150K seed round from Rajasthan Angel Innovators Network (RAIN), valuing the company at a decent $3.9 million.
The funding, led by Rajasthan Angel Investors Network (RAIN), will be primarily utilised to develop the product, research in the existing Artificial intelligence(AI) and expand their team.
Founded in January this year by Abhinav Garg, Alok Gautam, Ankur Garg and Li Jian, Hotify in an android app that brings recommended, relevant and timely content from across the web to its users. The company claims to deploy incremental machine learning, quantum cognition and artificial intelligence tools that decipher the likes and dislikes of users and syncs with the user’s social media accounts for better content curation.
RAIN, a group of investors interested in early stage businesses, is also an investor in Blue Box Media Pvt Ltd, the media group which owns this publication.
In India, the app is competing with a number of other players like InShorts (formerly NewsInShorts), DailyHunt (formerly NewsHunt) and Flipboard, which acquired Zite in March 2014. On the global front, it competes with the likes of Circa and NewsHunt and Flipboard. Hotify will face stiff competition from the likes of InShorts in particular, which is backed by close to $25 Million from Tiger Global.
It will be interesting to see though, as to how Hotify fares in this already densely populated news aggregation segment. While these apps look like a lucrative segment, global downfall in investments and ultimate decline of some of the biggest names in this segment has led to scepticism, whether these aggregation apps could actually function that way. Flipboard, which is perhaps the most dynamic and intelligent news aggregation app right now, too has failed to show any promise in terms of either user growth or revenues.
We have extensively reviewed Hotify in our feature series. You can read the detailed review here. To check out Hotify for Android, click here.
