The movement is belowpress offices are underway layoffs and publishers are afraid that AI technologies it will make things worse. Entering the fray, launching the newsreader Particle is working with publishers to find a new business model for the age of AI, where AI-powered news summaries don’t have to mean lost revenue. the startup, built by former Twitter engineersoffers a news reading app that helps readers understand all angles of the story by leveraging artificial intelligence to summarize news from a range of publishers.
Now, the company is bringing its first publishing partners into the mix to help guide its next steps.
On Monday, Particle announced that it had partnered with news organization Reuters to collaborate on new business models. As a start, Particle now subscribes to the Reuters newswire to help it provide information about current events in the news.
In addition, Particle closed $10.9 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a round that also includes investment from Axel Springer, a global media company that is home to brands such as Business Insider, Politico, Welt and Bild.
The partnerships and investments from media companies are intended to show how serious Particle is about working alongside publishers to achieve their goals, rather than trying to solve their problems for them.
Of course, focusing on publishers’ needs doesn’t necessarily translate to success.
This year, a16z-backed Twitter alternative Post News shut down after partnering with publishers to experiment with a micropayments business model where users would pay small amounts of money to read an article displayed in a Twitter-like feed. Artifact, the news app from the Instagram co-founders, was also recently spun off from (parent TechCrunch) Yahoo, following its efforts to leverage artificial intelligence to personalize the reading experience and summarize individual stories.
However, Particle’s premise is that it will offer something valuable to news consumers beyond just AI summaries. It also aims to provide a better way of understanding the news by analyzing all the different angles of a story using AI.
“Part of Particle’s thesis is … how a story is told from all sides of the spectrum,” explained the Particle co-founder Sara Beykpour, previously senior director of product management at Twitter. “We think it’s important.”
Beykpour had previously worked on products such as Twitter Blue, Twitter Video and Twitter Chats, and spearheaded the experimental twttr app while at the company from 2015 to 2021. Her co-founder at Particle is Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at both Twitter and Tesla.
The group, which was founded in February 2023, started with a more social focus given its past, but within a few months it narrowed to news and information, Beykpour said.
“We wanted to create an experience for consumers that really helps them cut through the noise and that helps them understand more [and] what happens faster and we want to do it in a way that is a sustainable situation, both for the readers who consume and for the publishers and journalists who produce the content,” he said.
Similar to Artifact, Particle will offer a personalized news experience. But to ensure people don’t get stuck in their own “filter bubbles” — that is, reading only those stories that fit their existing worldview — Particle will take a different approach to the content unit. In Particle, this section is not a single news article, but the story as a whole as told by multiple media outlets. This allows readers to see a multi-perspective view of a story and then easily click through to the various sources of the report. This model also limits repetition, so readers won’t see stories that are essentially the same as each other.
Under the hood, Particle uses a mix of AI technologies, including GPT-4o, to digest the news.
Currently, Particle selects the sources for stories from a range of publishers and will not allow users to import their own sources into the app. That could change in the future, but Particle wants to make sure readers are still exposed to multiple points of view.
This is an area that startups have tried to tackle in the past. A few years ago, Google engineers tried to fix information overload and media bias with an app called Brief, but it used human editors to summarize the news, not artificial intelligence. Twitter later hired this team. Earlier, the news app SmartNews also launched a feature that will show articles from across the political spectrum, but it is not the main driver of downloads.
What Particle isn’t ready to reveal yet is its business model. That’s because he hasn’t come up with one yet.
“We want to work with publishers to develop what this new model looks like. That’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with publishers and inviting other publishers and journalists to partner with us so we can develop it together,” Beykpour said.
However, he said all ideas are on the table, including revenue sharing, advertising and more.
With its Series A, Particle adds Lightspeed’s Michael Mignano on its board of directors. Other angels now backing Particle include Jason Goldman, Vijaya Gadde, Lakshmi Shankar, Bruce Falck, Shane Mac, Jill Bowen, Mohamad Taha, Roger Sippl and Max Mullen.
Prior to Series A, Particle had raised $4.4 million in seed funding in April 2023, backed by Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures and GC&H Investments, as well as various angels including Twitter and Medium co-founder, Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
David Brinkerformer VP of content partnerships at Snap and Tony Hailethe former CEO of digital news startup Scroll (acquired by Twitter), are the company’s official advisors.
With the funds, Particle is hiring in key roles, including a back-end engineer, SRE, community and editorial and a head of media partnerships.
Particle’s app is still in private beta testing with a small team on TestFlight for iOS. In time, it aims to support the web and Android as well.
