News in Shorts rebranded as inshorts

The app-only venture will evolve from being a news aggregator to a content discovery platform.

News in Shorts, a news app which raised $24 million from Tiger Global, has been rebranded as inshorts. The app-based platform has pivoted from a news aggregator to a content discovery platform. It will now provide a range of content streams like videos, infographics, podcasts, blogs and such.

The rebranding exercise is in line with the company's plan to build a recommendation engine that would serve highly targetted and contextual content to every app user.

Azhar Iqubal, CEO and co founder, inshorts says, "This is our first move in building inshorts as a customer centric company where every user would be served content based on his/her individual preference and profile. As we go along, we would aim to make inshorts the go-to app for all kinds of curated content discovery and, thereby, saving them from the pain of downloading multiple apps for multiple purposes."

Sachin Bansal, founder and CEO of Flipkart, who is also one of the angel investors in inshorts, states, "The team has shown a lot of promise and has successfully demonstrated the power of short form in today's mobile-first economy. The opportunities of content distribution over mobile are endless and the evolution to inshorts would unlock many of them."

News in Shorts began in 2013 as a Facebook page and went on to make rapid inroads in the app space with a million downloads by the first quarter of 2015, and expects to cross five million downloads soon. The 60-word summary format of serving aggregated news items made the app popular amongst the urban smartphone-savvy youth and inshorts will stick to that format to aggregate newer content categories like Opinion, Analysis, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Personal Finance, Sports, Career, etc.

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