Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4M
3 mins
Published by: Alina Chernomorets
18 March 2024, 08:20PM
Particle.news, a startup led by former Twitter engineers, is introducing an AI-powered news reading experience in its private beta release.
Founded by Sara Beykpour and Marcel Molina, the platform aims to provide a multi-perspective approach to news consumption while emphasizing fair compensation for authors and publishers.
The startup has raised $4.4 million in seed funding from investors such as Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures, as well as notable individuals like Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams.
Particle.news offers users a quick, bulleted summary of news stories from various sources, allowing them to choose between a brief overview or a more in-depth exploration of unfolding stories.
As concerns about AI impacting the news ecosystem grow, Particle.news seeks to address these challenges, competing with other startups like Artifact and Bulletin in the AI-powered news consumption space. The private beta serves as a testing ground before a wider release.
Former Twitter engineers are building Particle, an AI-powered news reader, backed by $4.4M
Particle.news, a startup led by former Twitter engineers, is entering the realm of AI-powered news consumption with its private beta release. Founded by Sara Beykpour, former Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, and Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla, Particle.news promises a multi-perspective news reading experience. While the startup hasn't revealed its business model, the founders emphasize the importance of fairly compensating authors and publishers. The platform offers a quick, bulleted summary of news stories from various sources, allowing users to choose between a brief overview or a deeper exploration of unfolding stories.
In an era where concerns about AI impacting the news ecosystem are growing, Particle.news aims to provide users with an efficient way to stay informed while respecting the interests of publishers. The startup raised $4.4 million in seed funding from investors, including Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and notable individuals like Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams. The private beta will likely serve as a testing ground for Particle.news to refine its offering and address any challenges before a wider release.
The benefit of AI is that it can do certain things that no existing human being can do. It can take all the known history of information and data that’s publicly available and synthesize it to help you understand more completely what is going on on a particular topic…it can do so much in terms of creating a natural language experience that is immediately consumable and comprehensible. It can do many things around supplementing the secondary discovery — the investigation that you might want to do to understand more deeply
Particle.news is not the only player in the AI-powered news consumption space. Other startups, like Artifact and Bulletin, have ventured into this territory with unique approaches. The success of Particle.news will depend on its ability to provide a valuable and unbiased news reading experience while addressing the concerns of publishers who fear a reduction in website clicks and advertising monetization due to AI-generated summaries. The platform's founders, drawing from their experience at Twitter, aim to make Particle.news a daily app that synthesizes news articles objectively and enables users to delve deeper into various perspectives on news topics.
So AI in this case is a combination of LLMs that basically do a lot of the hard work to give you that completeness, comprehension, and depth immediately — that was really hard to do, previously,
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