Constructing an app devoted to serving to individuals mixture and skim information, articles and social media posts in a single place is outwardly a troublesome proposition today. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets customers curate the information and posts they’d prefer to learn, is shutting down, seemingly due to its incapacity to scale quickly sufficient.
“We merely didn’t develop quick sufficient to maintain going. We weren’t in a position to scale it right into a sustainable product,” the corporate stated in an e-mail to clients asserting its closure.
GoodReads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing final June, aiming to make use of AI and the group to curate information articles, weblog posts, podcasts and social media posts from across the internet. The app let customers comply with their pursuits, submit content material, and vote on urged content material to point relevance. It additionally had AI-powered summaries and a bot that would reply questions.
The corporate stated within the e-mail that it had seven staff engaged on the product. Smashing had raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Energy of N Ventures, and several other angel buyers.
Fortunately, there are many startups engaged on the issue Smashing got down to tackle. We now have AI-powered information readers like Bulletin and Particle, in addition to feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry and Reeder — to select a number of.
Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram’s co-founders shut down their AI-powered information app Artifact final 12 months and finally bought the tech to Yahoo.
