Newsle provides a network- and person-oriented news alert service that tracks more than 100 million people and processes over one million articles per day from more than 100,000 sources. The product uses person identification, natural language processing and disambiguation algorithms to deliver personalized alerts about people users care about. Launched in 2011 by Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon while at Harvard, the team moved operations to San Francisco and operates with a small team of five. Newsle’s user base is growing roughly 20% month-over-month. The company plans to expand its natural language processing and data-mining efforts and hire new talent to improve its filtering and disambiguation. Financially, Newsle had previously raised $650K in seed financing in early 2012 and has now closed a Series A to add operating capital. Newsle was created in early 2011 by Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon as a way to find news about friends and contacts. The product is a massive RSS-feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources daily and aggregates over 1 million articles from major outlets, blogs, and local publications. Users can import Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts so Newsle serves a realtime stream of articles about the people they care about, with options for alerts and direct sharing via Facebook messaging or Twitter. The team has focused on disambiguation algorithms to distinguish commonly occurring names from the user’s actual contacts. In testing, Newsle had roughly 10K beta users. The founders have moved to San Francisco to work full-time and plan to hire engineers and launch mobile apps in the near future. The company has not yet solidified a monetization strategy but plans to add more local sources and potentially more targeted, subject-specific tracking.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Nov 2013