After selling Viki to Rakuten, Razmig Hovaghimian launches a new startup

Ripple founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian

There’s no denying that Razmig Hovaghimian is one of the most impressive startup stories to come out of Asia. From a failed pizza maker to owner of Viki, a video streaming site bought by Rakuten, to being Rakuten’s first-ever entrepreneur-in-residence, Razmig’s life as a founder has had many twists and turns. Now he enters another chapter with his newest brainchild.

“We are creating a hub for city news and stories happening right around you, tapping into the pulse of your city,” Razmig says. It’s an app called Ripple.

The idea behind it is simple: every story has a location. With this in mind, Razmig says he built Ripple to deliver relevant content – both text and video – to the right people through location tagging. With each city’s newsfeed, a user can view the top voted stories in their area. Essentially, he says the app acts as a “nearby” button for news.

The big question is credibility and authenticity of the reports from independent sources.

Aside from city newsfeeds, Ripple has a global feed where the most popular stories from all cities are featured.

“That’s what the name means. You ripple a story by upvoting it and more and more people will get to see it,” he tells Tech in Asia.

After bootstrapping since January, Razmig today revealed that Ripple has secured a US$4 million series A round from investors, including some names from Silicon Valley and media heavyweights.

The investors are Rakuten, Greylock Partners, Graph Ventures, Social Capital, Charles River Ventures, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Pejman Mar Ventures, Matter Ventures, 500 Startups, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and angel investors Blake Krikorian, Magdalena Yesil, and Shane Smith of VICE Media. Rakuten of course is an existing backer of Razmig – along with Greylock, Charles River, and Joi – having invested in Viki before.

Previously in beta in San Francisco – its base – and Oakland, Ripple launches publicly today with the addition of news streams in New York, London, Cairo, and Bangkok. It’s available for both iOS and Android devices.

A hybrid

Hyperlocal news apps aren’t a new thing. However, unlike others, Razmig says Ripple isn’t just a collection of news from media groups and blogs. It’s a hybrid of that and original content from Ripple correspondents. These correspondents are “citizen journalists” who are actually living in the area where the news originates from. For example, users in San Francisco’s Mission District will find daily stories from Ripple correspondents who are working on the ground in Mission as well as local news partners such as KQED, Mission Local, and Hoodline.

Ripple encourages communities to tell original and quality stories that may not be captured by traditional media. It’s just not possible for media outlets to have a crew in every city – especially since many are facing budget cuts right now.

Such constraints have resulted in two trends in reporting: parachute reporting, where people only fly into a city or a community when something major has happened like a fire or a shooting, and internet reporting, where people cut and clip stuff online and don’t actually talk to people on the ground. Ripple goes against those two trends, Razmig says.

String of ventures

Creating ripples