Marcel Molina and I spent much of our careers building Twitter, where the question of the day was often: What’s Happening?
Today, we’re still looking for even better ways to answer that. The recent advancements in generative AI enable seemingly infinite new ways to try. A little over a year ago, we started thinking about how we might use it to tackle this right where the answers themselves often originate: news.
What we’re hearing
Even though there are many ways to read or discover the latest news out there, and approximately ~21% of Americans actually pay for news, the experience is still frustrating.
In our signup survey, we ask, “What do you find difficult or frustrating about keeping up with the news?” Here are some of the responses, each of which were echoed by hundreds of others:
“I want diverse perspectives and in order to get those I need to read different sources which takes time.”
“[I want] Aggregation, summarization, freshness, and de-duplication”
“I would prefer the news to come to me as opposed to me searching out the news”
“…it’s difficult to get quality, incremental updates on evolving situations”
“[There’s a] constant barrage of paywalls and ads when I’m just trying to get the gist of what’s going on”
What we’re building
At Particle, we’re reimagining your daily intake of news to help you understand more, faster. Particle lets you browse a personalized list of news stories, to get you quickly up-to-speed at a glance, or go infinitely deeper to understand various perspectives, broader context, and how a story has unfolded over time. We’re still in private beta. You can sign up for the waitlist here.
Industry
With the headwinds facing media, news, and journalists, we aim to evolve how we work with them, while making sure everyone is fairly compensated. Journalism and digital media formats as they exist are evolving quickly. As new models emerge, we want to help define them together. We want to harness AI to amplify those same publishers, authors, as well as readers, through an incredible product experience.
After all, you can’t answer the question “What’s happening?” without great journalism.
Team
Our team has decades of experience building consumer products at the intersection of news and social, that meet complex user needs, in a delightful way. We are passionate about creating experiences that connect people with what they care about.
Sara Beykpour, co-founder and CEO, spent over a decade at Twitter, as an engineer and product leader, shipping products such as Vine, Periscope, and Twitter Blue. She graduated from the University of Waterloo in Software Engineering and Cognitive Science.
Marcel Molina, co-founder and CTO, was an early engineer at Twitter (and a Lit major before that!), where he was fortunate to work on many of its foundations such as Retweet, Notifications, Conversations, Lists, and follower analytics, as well as the systems underlying them. He designed and built manufacturing execution systems at Tesla that were adopted across Gigafactories worldwide.
Our team of nine is based primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area, with members across the USA and Canada. Collectively, we combine experience from Google, Square, Lyft, Periscope, Tesla, Twitter, and others.
Funding
As we open up our private beta TestFlight and come out of stealth, we’re honored to have raised a $4.4m seed round last year, led by Steve Jang at Kindred Ventures, alongside April Underwood and Jess Verrilli at Adverb Ventures, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, and with the support of our angels Scott Belsky, Jonathan Chen, Arya Asemanfar, Nick Kallen, Mo Al Adham, and James & Dani Gallagher.
Of Course, We Are Hiring
If you love to ship products, please join us! jobs@minalabs.io
~Sara Beykpour
Sign up for the waitlist here.