Indian startup bags $20M funding to help you skim the news

India’s News in Shorts has raised US$20 million in series B funding from existing investor Tiger Global. The media startup received US$4 million earlier this year.

News in Shorts crunches news stories into a crisp 60-word skeleton for busy readers in India. It has a team that manually curates and summarizes the news in categories like national, business, sports, and technology.

“We noticed that most of our friends were not even aware of the basic happenings of the country and around the world,” says co-founder and CEO Azhar Iqubal. “Although there were many media houses providing informative news, it was not being served in the manner which was easy to consume. The idea to ease the process of delivering news was simple- write the gist of the news in less than 60 words and deliver it to the user in an extremely simple way.”

Iqubal dropped out of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) along with his college mates Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav in order to work on News in Shorts.

Humble start

The startup began as a Facebook page in 2013, and picked up followers immediately. It was shortlisted for the third batch of Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups program and was then incubated at TLabs. The team raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding last year from Times Group, Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, and other angel investors.

With the US$20 million injection, News in Shorts will up its tech mettle. It plans to expand the team for improving the user experience further.

It claims to have one million downloads and is amongst the top three news apps in the country. There’s no data for how many active users it has.

News in Shorts competes with apps like Pipes, which provides a summary of popular articles on topics that are of interest to the user. It’s also up against other homegrown reader apps such as the Flipboard-esque Newshunt.

Circa, the US-based startup founded in 2011 that specialized in news summaries, has shut down.