Particle.News

Particle.news operates an AI-powered news platform designed to reshape how users consume information by making it faster and easier to comprehend. The company was founded in 2023 by Sara Beykpour and Marcel Molina, both of whom are former Twitter engineers. Their collective experience at the intersection of real-time information and user platforms spurred the creation of Particle, aiming to address the cognitive overload of the modern news cycle, a challenge they took on around the time ChatGPT emerged.

Beykpour, the CEO, has a background in Cognitive Science and spent over a decade at Twitter in engineering and leadership roles, including Senior Director of Product Management, where she worked on projects like Twitter Blue and the experimental twttr app. Co-founder and CTO Marcel Molina was a senior engineer at Twitter, contributing to foundational features like Retweets and Lists, and also worked at Tesla on manufacturing execution systems. The duo, along with other former Twitter colleagues, developed the initial concept into an iOS application.

The platform's core function is to aggregate articles from numerous publishers and use artificial intelligence to organize them into cohesive "Stories." Instead of just presenting a list of articles, Particle generates concise, bulleted summaries to give users a quick overview, while also allowing them to delve deeper into how a story has unfolded over time. The service is designed to present multiple perspectives, drawing from a wide range of sources across the political spectrum to help users avoid filter bubbles. Unique features include an interactive Q&A where users can ask questions about a story, audio summaries for listening on the go, and tools like "Opposite Sides" which visualizes the political leanings of the coverage. Users can personalize their feeds by following specific topics, people, or publishers.

Particle's business model is centered on collaboration with the news industry. The company has established partnerships with publishers like Reuters, TIME, Fortune, and Agence France-Presse (AFP), subscribing to their content via APIs and newswires. This approach aims to create a sustainable model that benefits both readers and content creators by driving traffic back to the original sources, which are prominently displayed with branding and author bylines. While currently free on iOS, the company is exploring various business models, including revenue sharing and advertising, in collaboration with its partners. The company has secured significant financial backing, raising a $4.4 million seed round in early 2024, followed by a $10.9 million Series A round in June 2024, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from investors like Axel Springer and Kindred Ventures.

Keywords: AI news, news summarization, news aggregation, Sara Beykpour, Marcel Molina, media technology, personalized news, multi-perspective news, news platform, financial technology, venture capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Axel Springer, Reuters, information consumption, news analysis, AI journalism, digital media, content discovery, story clustering