Constructing an app dedicated to helping people aggregate and browse news, articles and social media posts in a single place is outwardly a troublesome proposition lately. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users curate the news and posts they’d prefer to read, is shutting down, seemingly due to its inability to scale rapidly enough.
“We simply didn’t grow fast enough to maintain going. We weren’t in a position to scale it right into a sustainable product,” the corporate said in an email to customers announcing its closure.
GoodReads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing last June, aiming to make use of AI and the community to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts and social media posts from around the online. The app let users follow their interests, submit content, and vote on suggested content to point relevance. It also had AI-powered summaries and a bot that might answer questions.
The corporate said in the e-mail that it had seven employees working on the product. Smashing had raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several other angel investors.
Thankfully, there are many startups working on the issue Smashing set out to handle. We’ve AI-powered news readers like Bulletin and Particle, in addition to feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry and Reeder — to select a couple of.
Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram’s co-founders shut down their AI-powered news app Artifact last yr and eventually sold the tech to Yahoo.
