SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin’s SK Ventures, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi.
“40% of our current funding is provided by Davids,” Galligan jokes.
As to what Circa will actually be when the product finally launches? Well, the company is keeping many details under wraps. “A lot of what we’re doing is entirely new and I don’t say that lightly,” Galligan explains, revealing that the startup is committed to solving the information overload problem, “There are no sacred cows in this.”
While Galligan is keeping mum on what exactly the play is, he does divulge that the idea for the startup grew out of Ben Huh’s “Moby Dick project,” which aimed to find a solution for humanity’s current state of TMI. He also reveals that it is not a pure news aggregation play like Digg or Techmeme, “We’re solving a different kind of problem. There is more information created today than ever before. But as a society we’re less informed.”
The five person company plans on using the funding to hire more engineers who are enthusiastic about building a mobile experience — And who want to make consuming news and staying engaged with stories much easier via mobile. “We’re trying to make it so that people educate themselves for 5 minutes as opposed to play Angry Birds,” Galligan says.
More and more people are relying on mobile as their primary source of news yet the content itself continues to be produced in a format that translates very poorly to mobile devices. Rather than trying to shoehorn existing content into a new environment, Circa is creating the first born-on-mobile news experience. It will deliver news in a unique format – native to mobile devices with an experience intuitive to mobile users. Through comprehensive yet to-the-point news updates paired...
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