Smashing, the reading curation app by Goodreads’ founder, shuts down

Constructing an app devoted to serving to folks combination and skim information, articles and social media posts in a single place is seemingly a troublesome proposition lately. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets customers curate the information and posts they’d wish to learn, is shutting down, seemingly due to its incapability to scale quickly sufficient.

“We merely didn’t develop quick sufficient to maintain going. We weren’t capable of scale it right into a sustainable product,” the corporate stated in an e mail to prospects asserting its closure.

GoodReads’ founder, Otis Chandler, launched Smashing last June, aiming to make use of AI and the neighborhood to curate information articles, weblog posts, podcasts and social media posts from across the internet. The app let customers observe their pursuits, submit content material, and vote on urged content material to point relevance. It additionally had AI-powered summaries and a bot that would reply questions.

The corporate stated within the e mail that it had seven staff engaged on the product. Smashing had raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Energy of N Ventures, and a number of other angel buyers.

Fortunately, there are many startups engaged on the issue Smashing got down to deal with. We’ve got AI-powered information readers like Bulletin and Particle, in addition to feed aggregator apps like Feeeed, Tapestry and Reeder — to choose just a few.

Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram’s co-founders shut down their AI-powered news app Artifact last year and eventually sold the tech to Yahoo.