Funding story

Online media  outlets continue to be major money-spinners. After recent gains accrued by TheNewsMinute, Bangalore-based Hotify notched up a significant breakthrough, notching up $150,000 in seed funding, and capping off the valuation at $3.9 million. Rajathan Angel Investors Network(RAIN) led this round. The raised funding is expected to be used to enhance AI capabilities and to attract new talent.

What is Hotify?

Created in Jan 2015 by Ankur Dinesh Garg, Alok Gautam, Li Jian and Abhinav Dinesh Garg, Hotify seeks to make it big in the e-media segment. The mobile-only service claims to be an “intelligent” app, which provides users content specific to their particular desires. Such intelligent behaviour allows for the great personalisation of user content. News from a variety of sources, pertaining to all possible aspects of our day-to-day lives, is collected for users. Hotify also has a number of other exciting features-a variety of different user reading modes are provided, all of which are geared towards greater content personalisation and interactiveness. Hotify seeks to tap the potential of the virtual assistant newsreader, eliminating the need for the user to follow the feeds and timelines of many different journos and news providers.

About the segment as a whole, and future prospects

A number of magazine and news apps share this space with Hotify-these include the likes of DailyHunt(formerly NewsHunt), Flipboard and InShorts. Ankur is confident, however, that their unique information discovery methods will put Hotify in the lead. The app seks to strengthen the tech used-its unique algorithms tap machine learning to provide the best possible content discovery experience for users, and implement a number of other key developments. These inclde increasing the range of sources from which the app derives its content, since the virtual assistant model’s efficiency is heavily reliant on the searching capabilities of the assistant itself. Overall, it can be said with confidence that this app has a bright future.

For more info, visit the website, or download the Android app.