Inshorts-news in short
The attention span of humans has been decreasing with time because of the extreme use of digitalization and social media. It became very difficult to keep yourself updated with all the important news.
Inshorts previously known as News in shorts is the top second news app in India. Today Inshorts is India's highest-rated news app in the play store.
Inshorts is a short-news app Noida-Delhi based start-up known for its 60 words aggregated content and distribution of the content for Android and Ios. This news includes content like videos, blogs, photos, and summary.
The three IIT dropouts Azhar Iqubal, and Anunay Arunav of IIT Delhi from Mathematics and Computing departments, and Deepit Purkayastha of IIT Kharagpur from Computer Science and Engineering have addressed above problem and co-founded "Inshorts" a formerly known as 'News in Shorts' in April 2013.
 |
| Inshorts co-founders |
The app's interface displays an image, a headline, and the article in just 60 words and the next item can be accessed simply by swiping across the screen if you want to read the full article.
Inshorts is India's highest-rated news app in the play store and Inshorts become one of the most popular news apps in India with more than 15M downloads across Android and iOS, and 3B page views per month in Android according to wan-infra report.
Inshorts is specially designed for the working professional, students, and all other people who are so busy in their work and have very little time for reading the news. It has changed all the news echo-system.
Recently Inshorts is using the Rapid60 algorithm which developed for around a year and it has been trained based on a database of more than half a million articles that have been summarized by Inshorts editors over the past five years. This was again a good step and this AI-based technology is something different.
Inshorts users are active for an average of 15.4 days per month and 4.5 days per week. The company became operationally profitable in November 2017 with a net revenue run rate of Rs 25 crore ($3.4 million). Inshorts revenue for 2019-20 was $14 million.
Basically, Inshorts have everything like others, a client downloads the application, selects topics, reads the news, AI learns the preferences, and inputs more interesting articles.but what is unique in that is uniqueness in the format. Its editors reduce any regular media material to 60 words and their amazing advertisement ideas.
Table of Content [Hide]
"Discovery of Problems"
Founders found given some of the problems given below and agreed on these for the solution.
First problem
The first problem they came across was medium of news at that time.
1. The articles are too lengthly
2. There are thousands of articles published in every single day
3. The articles are opinionated
The new generation around us is considering this media thing as boring and reading a physical newspaper they seen as a waste of time, like why should we waste half an hour of time in the reading newspaper? Probably the younger generation is very fast and they need everything on their fingertip. They just can’t invest time in one thing.-Azhar, Co-founder & CEO Inshorts
Second problem
The second problem they encountered was that the youth of the country was not getting updated with the news going around them. Some of the friends of Azhar from IIT didn't know who was the home minister of the country at that time.
so, Azhar and Team have seen big problems in that and decided that let's bring India into the habit of reading news.and they thought that if they can be built such a product which is used by Indian people then there would be many ways to generate revenue.
"Inshorts - a solution"
The way they started to look at the problem is that if you will go and see the media people, they are good at generating good quality of content. But when it comes to distribution or aggregation of content most media people fail.
The mobile ecosystem something which is different, Media people are good content creators but when it comes to distributing the content and when it comes to the mobile ecosystem Inshorts team believed that there was some lacking in the system. so that they thought about distribution of mobile content.- Azhar Iqubal | Co-founder & CEO | Inshorts
 |
| Inshorts becomes reseasons for many to read the news. |
Azhar and the team also believed that product Inshorts could be extremely helpful for the developed market because the product is about speed, about short of time, the people in the developed market are extremely short of time so definitely, the market like the US could be a big potential market.
At that time Azhar and team thought and they saw Inshorts as they were aggregators. they would partners of media companies because Inshorts would take content from them and summaries and publish the team.
See how the Inshorts works:
The way Azhar sees in the long run, Inshorts will be a market place where all these media companies will writing all these 60-words summary and distributing through Inshorts platform. As per Azhar, the only thing they were claiming that there is a market for short term content and which is open right now and it becomes very true.
Inshorts Features
Inshorts have been focusing more on the content and the user's experience. They have started generating more and more content and they would love to increase no of the count of content published every day.
The second thing they are working on is to build an algorithm which can give the best result and good experience of that 50 or 60 news which are of your importance.so out of that all thousands of articles you might be interested in. and start publishing more and more news items so that Inshorts can serve more and more peoples.
General Features of Inshorts
1.newsworthy articles
2.relevant articles
3.factually relevant
4.Free from bias and opinions
Inshorts provides articles of just 60 words anyone can read it with an average of 30 sec. The second thing is that Inshorts provides only the top stories of the day and not thousands. The most important thing is that they provide only facts and not any opinions.
Now after growing big in recent times it became more attractive. They have creative ideas of generating revenue which are also liked by most of their users. Read in detail about the six creative ways of revenue generation below.
Here is the short video, by which you can feel the purpose of Inshorts
Inshorts - Explainer video:
Inshorts Co-founders
Azhar Iqubal- Co-founder and CEO of Inshorts
A Story of Azhar Iqbal and his entrepreneur mindset started in 2009 when he joined IIT Delhi. he had lots of options to explore like what other IITians generally have like MBA, Ph.D., and others. Meanwhile, he got to know about the startup world and the first startup he Encountered was Flipkart and then Snapdeal.
 |
| Azhar Iqubal- Co-founder & CEO of Inshorts |
IITs always has one benefit that it organizes many events. In such events, Azhar got the opportunity to learn things and met different peoples. He found one problem around him that getting updated with what happening in the country, that's why an IIT Delhi dropout Azhar cofounded Inshorts along with Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav. Azhar is Co-founder and CEO at Inshorts.
How Azhar look at mainstream media?
There are many many other organizations of mainstream media all over the world from years and years. now Inshorts seeing that the consumption is at only in 5-inch mobile. we don't have a long paper where we can serve long stories. also Inshorts wants other publishers to come into the place and start writing short-form content. the way we look at is there will be a long content market as used to be but there will be a parallel market for short-form content, Inshorts invite other stories and publishers through our platform.
Supportive Startup Ecosystem- as per Azhar
when you start your business two primarily most important things are you should have a little bit of capital so that you can keep your operations going and the person who whom you can approach for solving the problems any time and these two things are available in the Indian startup ecosystem which is not probably available few years back.
Deepit Purkayastha - Co-founder and Chief strategy officer at Inshorts
Deepit is from IIT Kharagpur in the computer science and engineering department. Deepit and Azhar are friends since high schooling. Both were from the same coaching classes. Also coincidently both got the same marks in their entrance exams.
 |
| Deepit Purkayastha- Co-founder and CSO at Inshorts |
From that time Azhar and Deepit are very good friends and their harmony has been matched in many areas. Though both are from different IITs, they decided to work on this startup. Deepit is Co-founder and chief strategy officer at Inshorts.
#Tips for Entrepreneurs from Deepit
you should be work always consciously that in future what can be the impact due to this. you should not get regret in the future about what you are doing currently.
Culture, environment, and support in terms of Entrepreneurship from KGP a collage of Deepit:
Beautiful work culture is there in terms of adoption of ideas you can take your own space & time. There are also different placement program schemes which would help students in later time means if some ideas like startup may fail and after that, if someone wants to go for placements so that would be useful. Professors are also very supportive as per the Deepit, it was the first one year leave that was processed of Deepit from collage in the case of Deepit leave.
Entrepreneurship schemes at KGP - most of these schemes are indirectly addressing parents like this deffer placement programs are working on that. it may be of 1-year leave nut it shows that if the institute is incentivizing such things than parents gets some confidence okay if the institute is saying mean there is a certain level of trust associates with these activities. these 2 schemes and there also some types of grants and funding in different ways.
Anunay Pandey - Co-founder and Director at Inshorts
 |
| Anunay Pandey- Co-founder and Director of Inshorts |
Anunay is also from the same stream from IIT Delhi with Azhar and he was a room partner with Azhar during college. Anunay is also a good friend of Azhar and he has very well knowledge of Technology and all. So, because thought process matched he is also a co-founder of Inshorts and three IITians Co-founded Inshorts in 2013.
Inshorts Scaling and Journey
As stated before the journey of Inshorts started by three IIT dropouts. They found many common problems around specifically in the young generation. Seeing this repeated pattern around them, and after talking to many of these people, they concluded that the only reason that the lack of required source of content.which can solve all those problems.
As per them, they hadn't use a kind of big data for this startup. It is that co-founders feel these problems and many people agreed on that and after that, they just thought that the problem was worth solving.
They started exploring the market in December 2011 and met different people and found all these general and major problems around them. And launched the first product News in shorts(NIS).
At the beginning of the app there was signing up process for reading the full article and that was also a hassle-free just via Facebook account. but now there is no such process.
Founders believed that there was a market for long-form content where people used to write long stories people will continue to read that at the same time there is a market for short-form content parallelly because of the mobile screen size, because of the generation we are into, because of the speed in we are moving into there is a market which is evolving, which is a market of short-form content.
In just a few months, News in Shorts has got a strong 50k fan following on Facebook, 1000+ Android app downloads, and was selected in the TLabs Accelerator program run by Times Internet. They(founders) worked with the Tlabs, learned many things, and got an insider perspective of a company that how big giant companies were running.
They planned to scale by building on the "personalization" and "summarisation" capability of their product. Inshorts raised an undisclosed seed funding amount on 15 Nov 2013. from the noted investors like Sachin & Binny Bansal.
I am a user of the product and it saves a lot of my time every day. News in Shorts has the opportunity to redefine the future of news consumption via mobile.- Sachin Bansal, Co-founder of Flipkart
The next challenge was to build a customer base and for that, they tried social media, word of mouth, and other different forms to scaling up, in the next year of 2014. Till 2014 they didn't focus on generating the revenue but the complete focus was on the users and problems in the country.
In an interaction with Techcircle.in in December 2013, co-founder Purkayastha had said that the app had seen more than 10,000 downloads in three months of going live, and around 250 downloads per day. NIS used to provide only 30 news stories per day till 2014 and is looking to increase this number. After in July 2014, Inshorts raised undisclosed amount seed funding.
All of their investors have been very supportive in nature and mentoring them actively. This is one of the biggest advantages co-founders have. As per the CEO Azhar, they can seek help at any time for any kind of problem. Also, these investors have lots of experience in this corporate field for many years and they always guide these young entrepreneurs. Co-founders have the flexibility to call them any time to seek help in solving any of their queries.
With that funding, they have expanded their team to create more and more stories and serve more people. Till that time they were publishing around 30-40 news articles a day, which was not sufficient for many users.
At the same time, they were working on the personalization engine based on the user's experience so with that they planned to provide 120 articles a day. Inshorts never compromise with the user's experience. they also confirmed that they are financially secure in 2015 and might look to raise more funds in the future. Also, a stable version of their iOS app got approved on the App Store at that time in 2015.
The service was still not making money.“We want to innovate on the format of ads itself,” said Purkayastha and it was the big change or we can say an innovative step. As most of their focus and traction had been on the mobile app, they then shut down their website.
It's rare that content company without revenue raised so much investment that has primarily been driven by the fact that there is a huge opportunity out there for the people who want to consume short-form content.
Next Inshorts raised $4M in Feb 2015. The investment had led by Tiger Global, with participation from Rebright Partners of Japan and existing investors Sachin and Binny Bansal.
After that again Inshorts had raised a $20 million Series B round from existing investor Tiger Global In July 2015. On that series-B funding, Deepit had told that "this Series B capital will be used to develop the product — and in particular the Android app since the Google-owned platform accounts for around 80 percent of mobile devices in India."
In 2015 they launched my feed feature in the app so based on your interaction with the application means how much time you spend on your particular article, whether you liked that article, whether you share such an article, whether you read a complete story, and whether you bookmarked that article. At the time of initiation of Inshorts, none of the news aggregators or news app was doing recommendations like that.
 |
| Transformation of NEWS in Shorts into Inshorts |
In July 2015, the company had rebranded itself to Inshorts and also expanded its offering beyond the news to videos, blogs, and podcasts. The app had also revamped its UI to provide a more clutter-free experience.
In August 2015 Inshorts acquired retention headquartered in San Francisco for an undisclosed amount. After that Inshorts had been included by Google in its list of 50 Best Apps of India with other popular apps like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Inshorts had witnessed exponential growth in 2015.
The inclusion of Inshorts in Google’s list of top 50 apps for 2015 validates our brand promise of keeping our users informed by the means of simple, precise, and short-form content that could be consumed in less than 15 seconds. In 2016, our focus would be upon serving relevant content to relevant users.- Azhar Iqubal | CEO & Co-founder | Inshorts
Inshorts had then launched a Hindi interface to make inroads in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and based on its success, plans a foray in Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil by mid-2016.
After that Inshorts was currently working on building India’s first intuitive content recommendation engine. The company had also started a process of partnering with popular alternative content publishers and helping them to increase the reach of their content through the Inshorts platform.
Serving news summary to the users is look like a technically trivial task. the huge volume of the daily users keeps them on the toe to explore the new technology and new methods and to make the app more robust. Using machine learning to use the Personalization Engine to the configuration of a reliable notification system every day at Inshorts brings new challenges for their passionate team.
Inshorts had raised $5 Mn funding from its existing investor Tiger Global Management’s Singapore investment vehicle, Internet Fund III Pte Holdings. As per the company’s filings, the investment had made in Inshorts Singapore-registered holding company in September 2017. The amount was later transferred to the startup’s Indian subsidiary, Inshorts Media Labs.
They are trying to create more and more stories in back up but they are serving in what you are interested in because every single person is interested in different news and topics. Something which is interested to one person
might not be interested in another, means when they say they will create more
content that is to satisfy the need of different persons.
 |
| App Review of Inshorts |
Inshorts had partnered with over 30 content global and five e-commerce players for distribution of content Till 2017. It claimed to have served “3 Bn shorts” till 2017. According to Azhar Iqubal, Inshorts had more than 5 Mn installs on Google Play alone in Dec 2017.
According to an Economic Times report, in January 2018 Inshorts had become operationally profitable in November 2017, with a net revenue run rate of Rs 25 crore that year.
As per Azhar told to ET in Jan 2018 that:
We have over 200 advertising clients on board and are generating enough revenue from advertisements to become operationally profitable Some of our biggest clients include Vodafone, Mercedes, Amazon, amongst others,”
As per the statement of Azhar in 2018 "Rapid60 algorithm was being developed for around a year and it has been trained based on a database of more than half a million articles that have been summarized by Inshorts editors over the past five years. The top read stories will still be written by editors as they require attention"
Inshorts has achieved a revenue run rate of $10 million per annum in FY2019. When they started that 60-words short-form content used to be generated by the Inshorts team in house. now what they have moved into a direction where a lot of contributors and media publications are writing those 60-words snippets for Inshorts.
After building a strong user base in metros and Tier I cities, Inshorts is now planning something very big and different for Tier II and Tier III cities. Also, Founders wants to target Audiences outside India.
In recent times of 2019-20 Inshorts gone very much popular. They trying to using more and more Technology like AI and ML for personalization as well as for advertising. As described before Inshorts uses an AI-powered algorithm called Rapid60 to serve news articles into 60-word briefs.
With this algorithm has been trained on a database of previous millions of article s of editors and team can summarise more than 1 lakh articles per month. Inshorts recently launched a product called "Public" – a location-based, video-first, hyper-local social platform for stringers, publishers, and brands to report the news.
So this is how the Inshorts is going on the success ladder and the great example of Entrepreneurship, creative thinking and innovation, and a different way of looking at the things for solving the problems.
What is most unique is that the way of revenue generation methods and using Current AI technology. read below these two in detail.
Technological Advancement in Inshorts
Inshorts is now working on a combination of technology and form factor innovation. they are trying to use more and more technology along with the human interaction, which can bring revolution in short-form news content.
As per the ET report, Inshorts is adding an AI-based algorithm called Rapid60 that can automatically summarize a full-length news article to a 60-word news brief for Inshorts.
Inshorts CEO Azhar Iqubal told ET that :
human curation comes with a limitation on the number of articles they can produce. With the new feature, they can curate over one lakh of articles per month.
Unlike more complicated AI newsroom projects where machines are supposed to replace reporters or copy editors, Rapid60 is something different, which is designed to work with published content.
This algorithm has been trained on a database of about half a million articles summarised till now by Inshorts editors over five years. By using this Inshorts can summarise more than 100,000 articles per month.
As per the Inshorts team with this new approach editors rate stories on a 1000-point scale. The content is then personalized for readers based on a rating system ranging from 0 to 1000. It predicts reader interests based on time spent by them on each news card.
As per Deept Purkayastha.
“If an editor rates a story 1000, it will be pushed out to the audience, irrespective of their chosen interests,”
There is a different thought behind this statement also that these 1000 points articles would be most popular and lots of people want to read. that may be current affairs or any big news.
As per Azhar and team still, important articles would be served manually as same as before. According to Azhar, these important articles that mean the articles which are most trending, and which brings them a big amount of click in terms of revenue.
 |
| Inshorts revolutionizing news industry using ML and AI |
As per the report, Inshorts produces multiple story cards each day. The 20 percent most read content on the app, which brings in the lion’s share of clicks, is still entirely editorially curated and trumps the click-through rate of the 80 percent AI-driven content. which shows how aggressively they are using technology.
The relevance is a debated topic in the sense that on one side there is personalization, AI, ML kind of a narrative that has captured our imagination but for the news business, it is vital to break the echo chambers that are being built in various platforms that the user is already consuming.-Deepit Purkayastha, Co-founder and CSO, Inshorts
So by this Deepit means that the problem of a completely AI-driven news product is the possibility of consumers getting segregated into buckets, reading news that they are comfortable with, and not stepping out of their echo chambers.
Since purely AI-based news can become a risk, Inshorts tries to strike a balance between algorithmic and editorial judgment. The algorithm predicts reader interest based on how much time they spend on each card means still they don't want to compromise with the user's experience.
Plans for 2020 and near future
Inshorts recently launched a product called "Public" – a location-based, video-first, hyper-local social platform for stringers, publishers, and brands to report the news. As Inshorts moving in an unstoppable manner in the field of AI and creative innovation.
 |
| Inshorts Innovation in Ambient Interfaces |
Artificial intelligence and editorial collaboration
Data bifurcation and content summarization have proven to be one of the biggest challenges of AI and machine learning. Especially when your objectives are somewhat different and precise.
“Form factor influences algorithms more than we realize. One should take a call on the form factor, understand its biases and only then deploy AI as a subservient tool to achieve the company goal,”-Deepit purkayastha| Co- founder & CSO | Inshorts
Revolutionary Ad format
“Form factor influences algorithms more than we realize. One should take a call on the form factor, understand its biases and only then deploy AI as a subservient tool to achieve the company goal,”-Deepit purkayastha| Co- founder & CSO | Inshorts
Revolutionary Ad format
As stated before Deepit has already told In the starting that, they want to do something creative with Ad format and here it is. they have done a lot by using technology and creativity.
What they wanted is that the traditional ad format on the mobile was very very intrusive. Inshorts don't want to compromise user's experience, that's why they created and started with some ad formats keeping user's interest in mind. Revolution in the Advertising market via different formats of adds gives them 3x more engagement. Inshorts's primary source of monetization is advertising through B2B channels.
The company regularly collaborates with brands like Uber, Airtel, and Netflix for advertising. The nature of the advertisement would non-invasive, skippable, and appears exactly how a story card would and has native advertising feel to it.
Advertisers can share their ads to Inshort’s reader base in 60 words along with an embedded image, video, or animation. The ads do not involve mandatory engagement and are listed as “Powered by” along with the advertiser’s name. So this has been going best for the Inshorts, advertising companies as well as their users.
“Once technology and form factor begin working harmoniously, only then can publisher leverage that disruptive force. When Inshorts has launched 6 years ago, most media companies took print content and dumped it on a website, resulting in overwhelming consumer experience" as per Deepit Purkayastha.
The engagement the company sees on these sponsored shorts is much higher compared to the traditional interstitial ad format (ads designed to be placed between content), resulting in advertisers being willing to pay higher rates.
CEO Azhar told
Currently, we are working with almost 300+ advertisers and we add around 10 new advertisers every month. Our client list includes brands like Vodafone, Oneplus, Netflix, Mercedes, and Myntra among many others.
As per the Associate Editor, Karuna Sharma of Business Insider
The ads offered by the platform can be “broadly divided into six categories — out of which ‘60 words branded story’ is the most preferred one. Whereas the most engaging formats are ‘Digital Magazines’ and ‘Fact Cards’; the former is a mix of creatives with gifs, videos, and polls, and latter is a compilation of interesting facts about a brand, industry or an occasional day,”
Karuna Sharma also added that “Fact Cards are highly engaging as they get shared on social media very often and easily. "Digital Magazines", on the other side, helped Netflix get 3x more engagement as compared to text ads for its series – ‘The Umbrella Academy,’ within two weeks of its release. This is just one example Digital magazines will going to be a ry successful manner of revenue generation in the near future.
Opinion poll - Another creative idea of monetization
Inshorts also conducts Opinion polls. As per Inshorts Officials, The objective of the poll is to reflect the viewpoint of young, urban smartphone-user Indians towards National Politics, State Politics, Social Issues, Women Safety, Foreign Policy, Business, Technology, and Sports.
 |
| Inshorts Poll- ACreative Idea for revenue generation |
Our typical poll gets about 400,000 responders in a single day. We realize the huge ground of resources we’re sitting on, and we intend to make full use of it this year,”
Tarun Arora CMO Inshorts shared with the Business insider that,
“We have done multiple campaigns with Netflix for their web series like Narcos, 13 reasons why, the umbrella academy, and ghoul. for amazon, they have done a campaigned around oscar-nominated sci movie - reddy player one and many more. and they have also partnered with the brand like Toyota, Mitsubishi, levis, etc."
 |
| Types of ads format of Inshorts |
Inshorts’s form actor is single-screen cards comprising a headline, an image, and a crisp summary. These cards can be navigated by swiping and are editorially curated with AI-driven personalization
Our typical poll gets about 4 lakh [400,000] responders in a single day. We realize the huge ground of resources we’re sitting on, and we intend to make full use of it in near future.- Deepit Purkayastha | CSO | Inshorts
Inshorts Funding:
 |
| Inshorts Funding |
Seed Round:
Who?
Seed Round investor includes Times Internet Group, co-founders of Flipkart- Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, and serial entrepreneurs Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra.
Where to use?
The funding will be used to expand means to create more and more content and technology teams, also for marketing to increase the reach.
Why investors came?
At that time app had reached over 30000 users. Here is the view of Sachin Bansal Behind his investment: He was a user of the product and it saved a lot of his time. News in Shorts has the opportunity to redefine the future of news consumption via mobile.
Series A:
Who?
Series A round was led by Tiger Global’s Lee Fixel. Japan’s Rebright Partners, Sachin, and Binny Bansal participated in the round.
Where to use?
News in Shorts will use this fund to improve the technology along with this it plans to use algorithms for personalizing its content and user experience.
Why investors came?
Here is the view of different investors regarding their investment in News in Shorts:
Tiger Global’s Lee Fixel:
“This startup can revolutionize the way content is being consumed on mobile devices. The 60¬-word news ‘shorts’ is just a step towards that goal.” -Lee Fixel, Tiger Global
Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners:
“I personally find 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” -Takeshi Ebihara, founder of Rebright Partners
Sachin Bansal, Co-founder of Flipkart:
“We admire News In Shorts for its dedication to create disruption in the news space. We believe in the immense potential and high traction that the application is already getting, and this round of funding will give wings to their ambitions,” -Sachin Bansal | Co-founder | Flipkart
Series B:
Who?
The Tiger Global, existing investor invested$20 Million at the valuation of around $90-100 million(Rs.570-635 crore).
Where to use?
According to co-founder Purkayastha, They believed that the services are quite good at that time but they can be the best if they could invest more into it. He added that this Series B capital will be used to develop the product, in particular, the Android app because the Google-owned platform accounts for around 80 percent of mobile devices in India.
The team is also working on a number of new additions, some of them are a personalization engine that helps the users quickly find content that matches their interests, and a feature which allows users to express and share opinions on news via the service.
Purkayastha told TechCrunch in an interview:
“News is divided into facts and opinions. We’re trying to make users actively participate in the opinion process.”
Purkayasth revealed further in the interview that Initially, select a number of users would get this opinion feature, but the plan was to allow all News In shorts users to share their voices. Also, The funding would go towards,
- To hire more editors to increase the number of news briefs each day.
- To expand the services into more languages.
- To focus on potential audiences outside of India.
Why investors came?
Tiger Global led News In Shorts’ $4 million Series A round in February. At that time, the start-up is publishing around 60 or fewer news bulletins of 60 words per day and had 1,00,000 Downloads for iOS and Android.
In July, this number is gone up to 1.3 million(13X), and engagement has increased 18X over the same period. These impressive grow number was the major reason behind this funding.
Venture round:
Who?
According to filling, Tiger Global’s Singapore-Based affiliate investment vehicle, Internet Fund III Pte Holdings had Invested $5 million into Inshorts Singapore-based holding entity, Inshorts Pte Ltd. This Fund was later transferred to its Indian subsidiary, Inshorts Media Labs Pvt.
Where to use?
This fund will be used in developing Personalize products and Future Expansion.
Why investors came?
On the Back of Incredible Grow of the Start-up and Strengthen its position in India's new age News Industry.
Merger and Acquisition: RETENTION.AI
Inshorts Medialabs Pvt. Ltd had Acquired Parent of Retention.ai, Palo Alto/Bangalore based startup, Betaglide . on 14th Oct 2015. This was the first acquisition of Inshorts.
About retention.ai :
This Bangalore-based startup, Retention.ai, founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni Amritanshu Anand, Anshul Singhle, Manan Shah, and Abhimanyu Dikshit, in 2013. Retention.ai has worked with more than 12.5 million devices from its inception.
It had raised Series A funding from Mercury Fund, along with participation from angel investors like Pratyush Prasanna (Ex-VP PayTM), Punit Soni (Chief Product Officer, Flipkart) and Anshu Sharma (Ex-VP Salesforce, Venture Partner Storm Ventures). It was also part of the TLabs accelerator.
Retention.ai is helping app developers in analyzing user's behavior by using data analytics. The primary focus of startup is tacking uninstalled users. It finds the possible reasons behind uninstallation, draw insights on user experience, and improve user retention. Ultimately decreases user acquisition cost.
How will retention.ai help Inshorts?
Before the acquisition, retention had worked with Inshorts to provide app usability data with their developers that helped Inshorts to detect performance, bugs, and functional issues, even for low-end smartphones.
With this acquisition, Inshorts aims to accelerate its engagement with users. Currently, Inshorts plans to roll-out some Exciting features, likes recommendation engine. Their in-house data analytics team will ensure a hassle-free, enjoyable and smooth experience for users, and also help Inshorts in the execution of the above things so that the app delivers the promise on the time it makes to the users.
Carrer at Inshorts
Culture and Working Environment at Inshorts
At Inshorts there is an open culture for work environment they just want work to be done. There at the office or workplace itself lots of facilities are available like people can take nap they can play pool or can sit over a coffee and they don't mind if you come late or come in shorts. the only time required to dress up for parties and celebrations on occasions or at festivals.
The most fascinating thing about the people working there is their age all the people are youngsters and enthusiastic always full of ideas.
why should anyone join Inshorts?
if you want to work at a place which is full of young energy and new ideas.
Inshorts is one of the tech companies where people share the same passion, ambition, and philosophy. They could be the guys from sales and marketing professional, coders and even the editors, everyone is a contributor.
As per Azhar and Deepit they are looking for the people with whom the harmony matches and which posses the following criteria.
- self-motivated
- self-learner
- self driven-who like taking initiative at own
- hard working-handling things independently
- take ownership-execute from the very start to the very end
In competition with Inshorts
From the begging Azhar and the team never consider all the news publishers as competitors. But according to them, all the content aggregator are their competitor. At the beginning of the Inshorts Facebook, Twitter and some other sites were competitors of Inshorts. This is the one aspect, as per Azhar the value that Inshorts adding and the quality they provide is very different. this type of concept has never cracked anywhere in the world.
Comparison with Twitter and Facebook
Since 2016-17 Inshorts have been driving more traffic to a lot of content partners more than twitter given that is the scenario about the amount of traction that Inshorts is getting. This is not including traction that they are getting natively, this just through clicking, natively they getting 100 times more.
Inshorts actually solves the problem rather and not only takes care of its own revenue. As stated before With the large volumes of content on the web from mainstream news to niche content, millennials are facing a tough time keeping up with the news. as per Azhar "Probably the younger generation is very fast and they need everything on their fingertip. They just can’t invest time in one thing."
Circa, one of the pioneers in the space of short-form content, which had raised $5.7M in funding recently decided to go on an 'indefinite hiatus' as they were relying solely on venture capital to sustain themselves and still had not yet cracked their business model that suits the market. Cruxtor, which provides news aggregation in a timeline format, NewsHunt, and two other news applications trying to make sense with their technology in the content space but Inshorts adds unique value to their content consumers.