Creating an app dedicated to assisting individuals in consolidating and consuming news, articles, and social media posts in one location is proving to be a challenging endeavor in today’s landscape. Smashing, an app powered by AI that allows users to curate the news and posts they wish to read, is ceasing operations, seemingly due to its inability to expand rapidly enough.
“We simply did not experience enough growth to sustain continued operations. We were unable to scale it into a viable product,” the company stated in an email to customers notifying them of the closure.
The founder of GoodReads, Otis Chandler, introduced Smashing last June with the goal of utilizing AI and community input to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and social media content from across the internet. The app allowed users to follow their interests, submit content, and vote on suggested content for relevance. It also featured AI-generated summaries and a chatbot for answering questions.
The company revealed in the email that it had a team of seven employees dedicated to the product. Smashing had secured $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and various angel investors.
Fortunately, several startups are tackling the challenge that Smashing aimed to solve. There are AI-powered news readers like Bulletin and Particle, along with feed aggregator apps such as Feeeed, Tapestry, and Reeder — just to name a few.
The closure of Smashing follows the discontinuation of Instagram’s co-founders’ AI-powered news app Artifact last year, which was later acquired by Yahoo.
