Inshorts: Stay Informed (News App)
Inshorts is India’s highest-rated news app, with more than 3 million downloads on Android and iOS, which curates the most significant news items of the day and serves them to its users in just 60 words with a link to read the stories that interest them, in detail.
The curated synopsis for each story, called a SHORT, is a pioneer offering from Inshorts which allows users to stay updated with all the happenings of the day in a precise 60-word format, helping them save time and break through the clutter of clickbait headlines. The stories are carefully curated across categories like national, world, politics, business, sports, technology and entertainment, and are served in a strictly factual format, completely uncoloured with opinion. It also allows readers to scan through their preferred categories and bookmark SHORTS which they would like to read later.
This enterprise was set up by a team of IITians, Azhar Iqubal & Anunay Arunav of IIT Delhi and Deepit Purkayastha of IIT Kharagpur in 2013. The idea for this startup germinated out of an observation of the founders that the youth is increasingly getting disconnected with the idea of reading news everyday and the long form nature of news items make it difficult to keep themselves abreast with all the latest national and global happenings. To test the idea, they set up a Facebook page where the news summaries were served in the ‘Shorts’ format. The resonating success and engagement with the audience led them to launch the service through a mobile app, erstwhile known as ‘News in Shorts’.
Their entrepreneurial journey began from TLabs incubator in 2013 which was followed by a seed round from Times Internet and a group of angel investors including the founders of Flipkart. In 2015, Inshorts raised a Series A round from Tiger Global and Rebright Partners, landing its Series B within 4 months, from Tiger Global. By the end of 2015, Inshorts garnered more than 3 million downloads on Android and iOS and is serving more than half a billion page views every month since. Inshorts also continues to be India’s highest-rated news app on Android since January 2014 with a rating of 4.5, and in 2015 was included by Google India in its list of 50 best Android apps from India. It currently comes in with an English and Hindi interface.
The app is currently focusing on becoming a content discovery platform and is partnering with content publishers and brands to serve relevant content to its users based on their content consumption patterns. Inshorts aims to become a global content unicorn out of India with a billion users in the next 5 years.
