News discovery platform SmartNews closes $92m series E round

Japanese news discovery company SmartNews announced that it has raised US$92 million in a series E funding round, bringing its total funding to US$182 million at a US$1.2 billion valuation.

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The leading investors for the round were Japan Post Capital and global financial institution ACA Investments, according to a statement. Globis Capital, Dentsu, and DA Consortium also participated in the round.

SmartNews plans to use the capital to continue expanding its global engineering teams for mobile, back end, and machine learning development to fuel its growth worldwide. Currently, it has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Shanghai, and New York.

Founded in 2012, SmartNews uses machine learning to evaluate articles, social signals, and human interactions to deliver only relevant news for its users. It has over 400 US publisher partners for its platform.

The company claims to be the fastest-growing news app in the US with 500% year-on-year growth. It also became a unicorn earlier this year at a US$1.1 billion valuation after raising US$28 million from Japan Post Capital.

In 2019, it released its News From All Sides political slider, which uses AI to present media coverage from different political perspectives.

It also announced Smartview First, a licensing option aimed at helping both the media ecosystem and readers. The partnership program currently includes more than 30 major content providers such as BBC, Business Insider, Bloomberg, Reuters, and BuzzFeed.