Traffic is falling, newsrooms are facing layoffs, and publishers fear AI technology will make things even worse. Entering the race, newsreader startup Particle is partnering with publishers to explore new business models in the AI era to ensure AI-powered news summarization doesn't mean lost revenue. Founded by ex-Twitter engineers, the startup offers a newsreader app that leverages AI to summarize news from different publishers and help readers understand all angles of a story.
Now the company is bringing in its first publishing partner to guide it through its next steps.
On Monday, Particle announced it has partnered with news organization Reuters to work together on a new business model. As a first step, Particle is now subscribing to the Reuters newswire to deliver information about breaking events in the news.
Additionally, Particle raised $10.9 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round also included investment from Axel Springer, the global media company behind brands such as Business Insider, Politico, Welt and Bild.
The partnerships and investments with media companies are intended to demonstrate how serious Particle is about helping publishers achieve their goals, rather than trying to solve problems for them.
Image credit: Particle
Of course, focusing on publishers' needs doesn't necessarily lead to success.
This year, Post News, an a16z-backed Twitter alternative, shut down after experimenting with a micropayments business model in collaboration with publishers, where users would pay small amounts of money to read articles that appeared in a Twitter-like feed. Artifact, a news app from an Instagram co-founder, was also recently sold to Yahoo (TechCrunch's parent company), after working to use AI to personalize the reading experience and summarize individual articles.
But the premise of Particle is to provide more value to news consumers than just AI summaries — it also aims to give them a way to understand the news better by using AI to analyze different angles of a story.
“Part of the thesis of Particle is how news is covered from every angle,” explains Sara Beykpour, Particle co-founder and former senior director of product management at Twitter. “We think that's important.”
Beykpour previously worked on products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video and Twitter Conversations, and was at the company from 2015 to 2021 where he spearheaded the development of the experimental app twttr. Particle is co-founded by Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at Twitter and Tesla.
Founded in February 2023, the team initially started with a more social focus, drawing on their respective backgrounds, but narrowed their focus to news and information within a few months, Bakepour said.
“We wanted to build an experience that would help consumers cut through the noise and become more understanding. [and] “We want to find out more quickly what's going on and do it in a way that's sustainable and win-win for both the readers who consume it and the publishers and journalists who produce the content,” she said.
Like Artifact, Particle offers a personalized news experience. But to prevent people from getting stuck in their own “filter bubble” and only reading articles that fit their worldview, Particle takes a different approach to the unit of content: with Particle, the unit isn't an individual news article, but an entire story told by multiple media outlets. This gives readers multiple sides to a story and makes it easy to click through to different reporting sources. This model also reduces duplication, so readers aren't essentially seeing the same article twice.
Under the hood, Particle uses a combination of AI technologies, including GPT-4o, to summarize the news.
Currently, Particle selects article sources from various publishers and does not allow users to input their own sources into the app. This may change in the future, but Particle wants to ensure that readers continue to be exposed to multiple perspectives.
It's an area startups have tackled before: A few years ago, Google engineers tried to combat information overload and media bias with an app called Brief, which used human editors rather than AI to summarize news stories; Twitter has since acquired and hired the team. News app SmartNews also previously launched a feature to surface articles across political lines, but it hasn't become a major driver of downloads.
What Particle hasn't revealed yet is its business model, because it hasn't decided on it yet.
“We want to work with publishers to develop what that new model looks like. That’s one of the reasons why we’re working with publishers and inviting other publishers and journalists to work with us to develop it together,” Beykpour said.
But she said all ideas are on the table, including revenue sharing and advertising.
Particle is adding Lightspeed's Michael Mignano to its board of directors in the Series A. Other angel investors currently backing Particle include Jason Goldman, Vijaya Gadde, Lakshmi Shankar, Bruce Falck, Shane Mac, Jill Bowen, Mohamad Taha, Roger Sippl and Max Mullen.
Prior to its Series A, Particle raised $4.4 million in seed funding in April 2023 with backing from Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures, GC&H Investments, and a variety of angel investors, including Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
David Brinker, Snap's former vice president of content partnerships, and Tony Hale, former CEO of digital news startup Scroll (acquired by Twitter), serve as official advisers to the company.
With this funding, Particle is hiring for key roles including backend engineers, SREs, head of community and editorial, and head of media partnerships.
Particle's app is currently in private beta testing with a small group of people on TestFlight for iOS, with plans to support web and Android in the future.