Tiger Global leads $4m Series A round for India news app
Tiger Global has led a $4 million Series A round investment in India's News In Shorts (NIS), a mobile-based service that aggregates shortened news stories.
Japan's Redbright Partners and existing investors Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (no relation) - Flipkart co-founders - also took part in the round.
The start-up was set up in 2013 by Deepit Purkayastha, a dropout from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, with Iqubal and Anunay Arunav, also dropout from IIT Delhi. It raised its first seed round in June 2014 from a group on angel investors.
The NIS service is available as an app on both Android and iOS mobile operating systems. The app selects news stories across several categories, and edits them down to 60-word snippets.
The news categories users can select include national news, business, sports, technology, entertainment and miscellaneous. Full coverage can be read by clicking a link of the source provided at the end of each story. The apps claims 100,000 downloans on Android alone so far.
The funding will be used to help grow the number of downloads to between 2.5 million and five million by the end of 2015. The start-up is also looking to double the daily content from 60 summaries to 120 summaries. To do this the company is looking to build its 16-person team to 60 over the next few months.
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