Summify
A beautiful daily summary of the most relevant news from your social networks.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor investor investor investor investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Summify operated as a social news aggregation service, founded by Romanian developers Mircea Paşoi and Cristian Strat. The duo, who had previously interned at Google and Microsoft and programmed together since high school, established the company after turning down job offers from major tech firms like Facebook and Google. Their journey began in 2009 with a plugin called ReadFu, which provided contextual summaries of hyperlinks. In January 2010, the project was accepted into the Vancouver-based incubator Bootup Labs, leading the founders to relocate from Romania.
The service was rebranded as Summify in March 2010 and started a private beta. After initial user feedback, the company pivoted from a real-time news reader to focus on delivering periodic email digests. The core of its business was to solve information overload by analyzing a user's social networks—including Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader—to identify the most important news stories. It determined relevance by evaluating social signals like shares and likes, both globally and within the user's immediate network, and then delivered a concise summary of five to ten key articles via email, a dedicated iPhone app, or the web. This model primarily served individuals and organizations looking to efficiently consume news and stay informed.
Summify secured a seed funding round in March 2011 from a notable group of investors, including Accel Partners, Rob Glaser (founder of RealNetworks), and Stewart Butterfield (co-founder of Flickr). The company gained significant media attention, leading to its acquisition by Twitter on January 19, 2012. The acquisition was a strategic move for Twitter, intended to enhance its content discovery capabilities. Following the acquisition, the Summify team relocated to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. New user registrations were disabled, and the standalone Summify product was officially shut down on June 22, 2012.
Keywords: Summify, social news aggregator, news summary, Twitter acquisition, Mircea Paşoi, Cristian Strat, Bootup Labs, information overload, news curation, email digest, social media summarization, ReadFu, Vancouver startup, content discovery, social signals, Accel Partners, Rob Glaser, Stewart Butterfield, tech acquisition