This 2-year-old news app wants to get smarter with an acquisition

Inshorts – an app that feeds 60-word news summaries to users in India – has acquired Betaglide, the Bangalore-based company behind Retention.ai which tracks app uninstalls to help improve user retention. This is the first acquisition by Inshorts – earlier named News in Shorts – which had two rounds of funding this year, both led by Tiger Global, one of the top three most active investors in India this year.

Inshorts is also one of the first investments in India by Japan’s Rebright Partners. A series A round of US$4 million in February was followed within five months by a US$20 million series B round, showing the interest of investors in mobile content distribution ideas in India.

This year, the focus of players in this mobile-first market has been on getting consumers hooked on apps. Hence the ongoing Big Billion Day Sale this week by ecommerce leader Flipkart is in app-only model – that is, accessible only on its app and not the website. It hired German digital marketing firm Glispa to track the quality of app installs to zero in on loyal users who generate revenue.

Inshorts aims to get similar user insights from Retention.ai.

It all started as a Facebook page

Co-founders of Inshorts Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha, and Anunay Arunav

Inshorts began as a Facebook page in 2013. “As current affairs savvy people ourselves, we felt that the current media industry is designed to serve only those amongst us who have the time and patience to read through the news epics. If a person is interested in just the essential facts of the news, there is nothing for them. So we thought of building something that we ourselves would want to use,” the founders told Tech in Asia in an earlier interview.

It rebranded itself as Inshorts as the app went beyond news to include other content streams like videos, infographics, and podcasts.

Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and CEO of Inshorts, dropped out of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi to found the company with his collegemate Anunay Arunav and Deepit Purkayastha, alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. Betaglide, meanwhile, is a campus startup which sprouted out of IIT Kharagpur. Amritanshu Anand, Anshul Singhle, Manan Shah, and Abhimanyu Dikshit founded it in 2013 and moved based to Bangalore later.

Both Inshorts and Betaglide were incubated at TLabs. Betaglide raised series A funding from Mercury fund and angel investors Anshu Sharma, Pratyush Prasanna, and Punit Soni, Flipkart’s chief product officer. Inshorts too has a Flipkart connection: Sachin and Binny Bansal, co-founders of the ecommerce major, are early backers who invested an undisclosed amount in June 2014.

India has seen a spike in mergers and acquisitions this year, with well-funded startups taking the inorganic route to scale their customer base. This is good news for investors, who get faster returns on their investments, as well as new startups who get funding from reinvestments.