Constructing an app devoted to serving to folks mixture and skim information, articles and social media posts in a single place is outwardly a troublesome proposition lately. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets customers curate the information and posts they’d wish 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 mentioned in an electronic mail to prospects saying its closure.
GoodReads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing final June, aiming to make use of AI and the neighborhood to curate information articles, weblog posts, podcasts and social media posts from across the net. The app let customers observe their pursuits, submit content material, and vote on recommended content material to point relevance. It additionally had AI-powered summaries and a bot that would reply questions.
The corporate mentioned within the electronic 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 a number of other angel traders.
Fortunately, there are many startups engaged on the issue Smashing got down to deal with. We’ve AI-powered information readers like Bulletin and Particle, in addition to feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry and Reeder — to select just a few.
Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram’s co-founders shut down their AI-powered information app Artifact final yr and ultimately offered the tech to Yahoo.
