MUMBAI: News In Shorts, a startup that launched the India based mobile news app has raised Rs 127 crore from its existing venture capital investor Tiger Global in Series B funding. With this, the company, according to the Economic Times, is now valued at about Rs 570-Rs 635 crore.  

Founded by IIT dropouts Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha and Anunay Arunav, News In Shorts is a news publishing app that curates the top 60 news story of the day and crunches them into 60 word shorts for the readers. Its launch was actively backed by funding from Times Internet, mentors Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar and Manish Dhingra.

The app had crossed over 100,000 downloads for iOS and Android by February. “It is these increases, which directly led to this new funding round from Tiger Global,” News In Shorts co-founder Purkayastha informed techcrunch.com.

The co-founder further stated that this round of Series B capital will be primarily used to enhance their Android app, since the Google-owned platform accounts for around 80 per cent of mobile devices in India.

The report also highlights the editorial team’s plans on working on a number of new additions, including a personalization engine that predicts user’s interests, and a feature to allow users to express and share opinions on news via the service.

"The only focus that we have right now is to make sure that the app runs smoothly on lower-end smartphones as well," News In Shorts co-founder and CEO Azhar Iqubal told The Economic Times.

The startup hit the headlines earlier this year after it received Series A funding of Rs 25 crore from Tiger Global, with participation from Japan's Rebright Partners and Flipkart's Bansals.