Japanese startup raises funding for a new kind of interactive news site

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See the original story in Japanese.

Japanese startup Byus today launched the beta version of its interactive news service. The company also announced that it has secured an undisclosed sum of funding from Venture United, Incubate Fund, and Voyage Ventures.

The news site was initially launched in alpha version back in July. Unlike other news sites, it lets you to ask other users about a specific news topic, with an article page for every topic generated through this Q&A back-and-forth. Each article page has links to other articles for related keywords, so you can easily explore topics you like. Overall, the service helps you understand a topic in depth, not only by exploring various factual information but also by hearing the voices of others.

The news site prompts users to ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ to read every topic. But often they might not know enough a certain topic to decide on whether to accept. So this is why the development team decided to pivot towards a Q&A-based site. They also introduced a bookmarklet which helps users easily adds topics they like and ask others for more details.

We understand that an Android app will be introduced before this summer, and that the company plans to acquire 30,000 registered users by September.

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