News curator mobile app InShorts has raised funding of $5 million from Tiger Global Management through its Singapore arm, reports Inc42. The portal said that it found out about the development in company’s ministry of corporate affairs’ filings.

We have written to InShorts for confirmation, and how it plans to use the fresh funding. We will update the post as soon as we hear back from them.

Started in August 2013 by Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav, InShorts (then called New In Shorts) aggregates news across various categories and offers 60-word summaries to its users along with a link to the original article.It currently provides these summaries in two languages- English, and Hindi- through an Android  and iOS app.

Previous Funding

The Noida-based startup had earlier raised $20 million from Tiger Global in a Series B funding In July 2015. Before that, it had raised $4 million through a Series A round led by Tiger Global, with participation from Rebright Partners of Japan and existing angels Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish Dhingra and Flipkart Founders Sachin and Binny Bansal. In September 2013, it had received funding of Rs 10 lakhs (for 10% stake) while being part of TLabs’ fourth startup batch.

Competition

InShorts directly competes with apps like DailyHunt, NewsByte, Magzter, NewsRepublic etc. Beside, India has seen a surge in the number of news aggregators which provide info from national and international publications, and there is a host of news apps on Google’s Play store.

Apart from news apps from startups as well as from traditional media houses. Social network platforms are too becoming source of formal news. For instance, recently multimedia news portal BloombergQuint launched its WhatsApp broadcasting service to distribute news to readers in India.  Instant messaging app Hike Messenger had started aggregating news stories in Hindi, English and other regional languages in September 2015. The messenger had launched the News feature August 2015 where it would aggregate stories from leading English dailies.