Creating an app that helps people collect and read news, articles, and social media posts in one place is obviously not easy these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that allows users to curate the news and posts they’d like to read, is shutting down, likely due to its inability to scale fast enough.
“We just didn’t grow fast enough to keep developing. We were unable to scale it into a sustainable product,” the company said in an email to customers announcing its closure.
GoodReads founder Otis Chandler launched Smashing in June last year, aiming to use artificial intelligence and community to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and social media posts from around the web. The app allows users to follow their interests, submit content, and vote on suggested content to determine its relevance. It also featured artificial intelligence-based resumes and a bot that could answer questions.
In an email, the company said that seven employees were working on the product. Smashing has raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several angel investors.
Fortunately, there are many startups working on the problem that Smashing set out to solve. We have artificial intelligence news readers like Bulletin and Particle, as well as feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry, and Reeder, to name a few.
The closure of Smashing comes after Instagram‘s co-founders shut down their AI-based news app Artifact last year and eventually sold the technology to Yahoo.
