Delhi based News In Shorts, a mobile apps startup, has raised $4M in Series A round of funding led by Tiger Global with participation from Rebright Partners of Japan and existing investors Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (unrelated), co-founders of Flipkart. The Flipkart co-founders upped their investment in the latest funding round.The company plans to use the raised to build a larger team, ramp up technology, move into audio and video streaming and add a layer of personalization to company’s content.
Founded in August 2013 by three IIT dropouts Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha, and Anunay Arunav, the startup publishes news stories in 60-word bite-sized portion for use by busy readers. It has a team that manually curates and summarizes the news in categories like national, business, sports, technology, and so on.
“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,” said Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO, News In Shorts.
With the smart phone market growing rapidly in the country, News In Shorts is expected to see a lot more traction in the coming years. Last December, the News in Shorts Android app crossed 100,000 downloads on Google Play.
The Delhi based company has no plans of monetization for the next 2 years. “Later, we want to look at sponsored content and native advertising but currently, focus is to expand reach,” Iqubal said. The firm plans to cross a million downloads by June.
