Summly is an algorithmic news‑summary app that condenses news stories to improve the mobile reading experience. The product is available as an iPhone app and the company recently launched a more fully featured version. Summly was developed by Nick D’Aloisio, who has paused his formal studies to work full‑time on the company; the team has six staffers. SRI International is partnered with Summly and contributed machine‑learning and natural‑language‑processing expertise. The company says it plans to monetize the product (details not disclosed in the article). Summly operates in a crowded mobile news space but its investors and founder believe the app has an edge. Summly is a mobile app that automatically summarizes web content into bite-sized chunks to simplify browsing and reading. Formerly called Trimit, the app lets users condense text into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summaries and share them via SMS, email, Facebook, and Twitter. Founder Nick D’Aloisio, a 16-year-old programmer, built the service using genetic programming and an AI-based tool he says "mimics evolution," and has enlisted veteran programmers to build out the initial architecture. Summly’s patent-pending technology was tested by MIT researchers and reportedly outperforms the highest academically published results by about 30%. The company launched on the App Store and plans to use new funding to ramp up hiring, development, and to create patents. Financially, the startup raised a seed round of just over $250K from billionaire Li Ka-shing through his Horizons Ventures vehicle.

Total raised

$0M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Dec 2011