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Building an app dedicated to helping people aggregate and read news, articles, and social media posts in one place is apparently a tough proposition these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users curate the news and posts they’d like to read, is shutting down, seemingly because of its inability to scale rapidly enough.
“We simply didn’t grow fast enough to keep going. We weren’t able to scale it into a sustainable product,” the company said in an email to customers announcing its closure.
Goodreads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing last June, aiming to use AI and the community to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and social media posts from around the web. The app let users follow their interests, submit content, and vote on suggested content to indicate relevance. It also had AI-powered summaries and a bot that could answer questions.
The company said in the email that it had seven employees working on the product. Smashing had raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several angel investors.
Thankfully, there are plenty of startups working on the problem Smashing set out to address. We have AI-powered news readers like Bulletin and Particle, as well as feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry, and Reeder — to pick a few.
Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram’s co-founders shut down their AI-powered news app Artifact last year and eventually sold the tech to Yahoo.
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Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
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