Inshort, a mobile app focused towards providing news to its users in 60 words, has raised $20 million from New York- based Tiger Global investors. The company plans to utilise the raised capital to improve user experience and expand its presence.
News in Shorts, Noida-based firm, founded by Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Pandey and Deepit Purakayastha, has been in this business since 2013. News in shorts started out being a part of Times Internet’s accelerator program called TLabs in 2013. It was then that News in Shorts received its seed funding of Rs 2 crore from angel investors Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar and Manish Dhingra along with co-founders of Flipkart—Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal. News in Shorts, in February 2015, raised Rs 25 crore in its series A round of funding from Tiger Global which saw Japan’s Rebright Partners and Bansal-duo-of-Flipkart’s participation.
Azhar Iqubal and Pandey quit their studies at IIT Delhi while in the 8th semester to fully indulge themselves into developing the app and soon were joined by Purakayastha, who too dropped out of IIT Kharagpur.
Azhar Iqubal, Co-founder & CEO, News in Shorts, confide that the firm doesn’t have any monetization plans for the next 2 years. Yet, News in Shorts would be able to generate revenue through sponsored content and e-advertising.
News in Shorts has recorded a 100% month-on-month growth since September 2014, when it reportedly had 10k downloads with 3 million page views which went to 19million in December, helping them raise to Rs 25 crore, which now has reached to 1million downloads and a respected 4.5 rating on Google India app store, which has brought them the Rs 127 crore.
Presently, News in Shorts consists of 31 members. Out of the team, 15 are writers, who create the 60-worded summaries of the news stories. The rest of the team is involved in designing and developing the mobile application.