Japanese news curation startup raises $4.2 million

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SmartNewsSee the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Gocro, the startup behind news curation app SmartNews, announced today it has raised 420 million yen (approximately $4.2 million) from Globis Capital Partners.

Smartnews is a mobile app that curates trending news stories based on Twitter data, analyzed with its own original technology. To date the startup has partnered with 43 news services and 25 companies for content syndication, and is exploring more partnerships in many business sectors.

With this funding, the company plans to hire engineers and data scientists, and will increase its headcount from six to 40 over the next year.

In this news app space here in Japan, we’ve seen more than a few competitors including Vingow and Gunosy. It is an interesting sector to watch, especially now that Line has thrown its hat in the ring as well with its own news app.