Former Twitter Engineers Develop ‘Particle’, an AI-powered News Reader App

A team led by former Twitter engineers is revolutionizing the utilization of AI for news processing. Particle.news, has recently launched its private beta version. This innovative startup offers a customized, multi-perspective news reading experience. Apart from using AI for news summarization, it also promises to pay authors and publishers reasonably, or as they claim.

The business model of Particle is still under wraps. Meanwhile, the adverse effects of AI on a rapidly shrinking news sector give rise to concerns. Summarizing news through AI might reduce the clicks on publishers’ websites. Consequently, the ad-based revenue for such sites might also dwindle.

Sara Beykpour, ex-Senior Director of Product Management at Twitter, founded the startup last year. She worked on several products like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and conversations, and pioneered the experimental app, twttr. Her tenure at Twitter spanned from 2015 to 2021, wherein she ascended from the position of a software engineer to a senior director of product management. Marcel Molina, a former senior engineer at Twitter and Tesla, co-founded the startup.

As Beykpour elucidated previously, the aim of Particle is to simplify news-following through AI.

“Sometimes it feels like headlines are all we have time for. We also want to understand more, but faster,” she wrote in an introduction to the startup on Threads. “We’re in the early stages of using AI to transform the way we interact with news.”

Using Particle, news readers are offered a quick, bulleted summary of the story, with information pulled from a variety of sources. However, when announcing the private beta, Beykpour noted that readers can either use the summary to get up to speed or can choose to go deeper to “learn about how a story has unfolded over time.”

The venture-backed startup has raised funding from Kindred Ventures and Adverb Ventures, as well as various angel investors, including Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder, Scott Belsky.

Remarked Belsky on X, “Particle has become a daily app for me. It synthesizes the many articles (and angles) on any news topic, surfaces the key points as objectively as possible, and lets you dig further across many dimensions. In the era of abstraction ahead, great example of daily AI,” he wrote.

Particle provides a demonstration of its technology to users who are not logged in on its website. This is where articles are displayed with their summaries, the time they were last updated, and a small section at the bottom that lists their sources.

Sources are drawn from a broad range of political orientations, including prestigious publishers such as The New York Times, CNBC, the AP, ABC, CNN, Breitbart, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Politico, Fox News, USA Today, The Daily Caller, New York Post, The Hill, among many others. When relevant, international outlets are also considered, indicated by the demo. Nonetheless, each bullet point does not link back to its original source, making it challenging to verify the AI summary’s accuracy without scrutinizing all the articles. Notably, key terms are linked, and the photo that accompanies a news summary is marked with the publisher’s logo.

Given that Particle is currently deploying its private beta for testing, the final product may vary. It’s worth mentioning that there are plans to offer a mobile app in the future as the company is looking to hire a Senior iOS Engineer.

A similar model of leveraging a variety of news sources and then employing AI to summarize, was recently employed by Artifact, the now-shuttered startup from Instagram’s co-founders. In its case, Artifact’s team curated the news sources up front based on factors related to their integrity and quality. For example, the outlet had to be quick to make corrections, when wrong, and be transparent about their funding. We’re hoping to talk in more detail about how Particle vets its sources closer to a public launch.

Another AI-powered news app, Bulletin, also recently launched to tackle clickbait along with offering news summaries.

Given the interest in this space, what could make Particle stand out is its founding team. Arriving from Twitter, the co-founders have experienced what a real-time news ecosystem feels like, and have the technical and product experience to build a quality product. Whether or not publishers who feel that AI is eating into their space will feel “fairly compensated,” however, remains to be seen.

Adverb Ventures co-founder and Managing Direct April Underwood praised Particle in a post on LinkedIn about the firm’s investment.

“We got the chance to back them just as we were completing our very first close for Fund 1 — we had to wait for our first capital call to hit to wire them the money!,” she said on Sunday, adding that Adverb closed its $75 million Fund I just a couple of months ago. “Sara and Marcel are the kind of founders we dreamed of backing when we set out to build a new early-stage firm. They are going after a big problem space. They’ve got the skills to tackle big problems at a high level of product quality. And they can attract other talented folks to join them, and together invent a future consumers don’t know to ask for (yet),” Underwood wrote.

In an email with TechCrunch, she explained the opportunity ahead.

“In terms of the space, we believe AI is going to touch every aspect of people’s digital lives at work and at home. Couple that with the pre-existing conditions at play here — it’s hard to find breaking news from sources you can trust, and the social media landscape is rapidly evolving — and you have to believe that the way people consume news is going to be different a few years from now. Sara and Marcel are uniquely to help people get the news they need in a modern way,” Underwood said.

Requests for comment from Particle were not returned. Particle’s beta sign-up form is here.

— Sarah Perez can be reached at sarahp@techcrunch.com or 415.234.3994 on Signal. 

Updated after publication with additional comment from Underwood. 2/26/24, 4:30 pm et. 

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