IIT dropouts get funding from Tiger Global, Rebright Partners for News in Shorts

Noida-based News in Shorts has raised US$4 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global. Japan’s Rebright Partners participated in the round. Founded by three IIT dropouts Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha, and Anunay Arunav, the startup crunches news stories into a crisp 60-word skeleton for busy readers. It has a team that manually curates and summarizes the news in categories like national, business, sports, technology, and so on.

Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners, tells Tech in Asia that he finds the mobile communication space attractive in India. “The founding team at News in Shorts is young, bright, and full of enthusiasm. That was also one of the most important factors for us at this early stage,” says Ebihara.

News in Shorts 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 and then incubated at TLabs. It raised an undisclosed amount of funding in June 2014 from Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, angel investors and mentors Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar and Manish Dhingra, and Times Internet.

“As current affairs savvy people ourselves, we felt that the current media industry is designed to serve only those amongst us who have the time and patience to read through the news epics. If a person is interested in just the essential facts of the news, there is nothing for them. So we thought of building something that we ourselves would want to use,” the founders say. “We just felt the problem was worth solving and we took the plunge,” says co-founder and CEO Azhar Iqubal about the decision to quit IIT.

He adds:

We aim to own the mobile content space. Thousands of different forms ­- textual, video, and audio -­ of content are being generated everyday. We intend to make all of this easily consumable on mobile devices.

With the fresh funds, News in Shorts will up its tech mettle. It plans to algorithmically personalize its content and user experience.

The format is well-suited for the smartphone boom in India, with large numbers of people on the go looking for quick news updates on mobile devices. Last December, the News in Shorts Android app crossed 100,000 downloads on Google Play.

The Flipkart co-founders upped their investment in the latest funding round.

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