Japan-based news aggregating app SmartNews has secured $10 million in funding to expand US operations. The cash injection will be used specifically to staff out its San Francisco office, bringing in machine learning and data science specialists.
SmartNews ranks among the top five news apps on iOS and Android
Co-founder Kaisei Hamamoto believes that the move to San Francisco will help the company attract stronger talent during its growth phase. SmartNews is powered by machine learning algorithms to accumulate and curate articles from various sources. The minimalist design enables users to skim through articles faster and works well in places where Internet connections are less stable, such as subways.
Kaisei Hamamoto, Co-Founder of SmartNews, says:
“One of our hopes is to expand our business to world, the entire world. We need a Spanish edition, Indonesian edition, Portuguese edition. We need a lot of different languages, which takes a diverse range of technologies and people.”
Swedish entrepreneur, Niklas Zennstrom, adds:
“SmartNews machine learning is the key to breaking through to general consumers, even the emerging/developing world on mobile: SmartNews algorithms pick what’s trending and culturally relevant in different countries and regions. This is the breakthrough needed to scale news delivery to billions of mobile devices.”
SmartNews launched in October last year and has since been downloaded 10 million times worldwide, making it one of the top five news apps on iOS and Android. It is a popular app with publishers also, rendering the full site so they don’t lose out on app revenue.
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