NewsDistill raises $1,00,000 seed fund

NewsDistill, a Hyderabad-based news aggregator app, on Friday said it has raised $1,00,000 seed fund from noted investors and technology leaders for examsion and product development to meet growing demand and is likely to raise an equal amount in a couple of months.

The investors include Narasimhan Ganesh, Senior Director, Box.com, Ramana Thumu, Vice President, eBay, and Sudhir Mallem of Uber.

Launched in 2015, NewsDistill aggregates news sourced from various Indian newspapers, television channels, RSS feeds, custom feeds and social media in eight major Indian languages besides English, a company release said.

The news is presented through innovative algorithms to the user through a rich user interface application.

"There is a huge demand for personalised news feed on mobile apps especially for those who wish to spend quality time reading similar news from various media channels through multiple languages and quick filters," said NewsDistill founder Narasimha Reddy.

"NewsDistill is embarking upon expansion and product development to meet the demand. The current round of investment will be used towards product development and talent aquisition. Our short vision is to become the top news aggregator in India in the next few months," he said.

NewsDistill has recently upgraded its product features by adding world's first personalised "newsplayer" that auto-reads news on the mobile for the reader.

It has also introduced patented robotic voice besides working on creating hyper-local filters to keep the user connected to their neighbourhood always.

NewsDistill is co-founded by Narasimha Reddy, an engineering graduate from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad (JNTU) who had earlier worked with Yahoo, LinkedIn and Bhaskar Reddy, an aeronautical engineer.

NewsDistill is easy to operate and integrates more than 30 unique features. It is currently available on Android and web platform.

Currently NewsDistill is generating 50 plus million page views per month and aiming to reach 130 plus million page views by the end of November 2016. Around 19-20 minutes is the average daily user engagement time.

--IANS

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