Smashing, a reading curation app by the founder of Goodreads, shuts down

Building an app dedicated to helping people to consolidate and read news, articles and social media posts in one place is a tough proposal these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that can curate news and posts that users want to read, is shutting down because it cannot scale rapidly.

“We simply didn’t grow quickly enough to continue. We couldn’t expand it to a sustainable product,” the company announced the closure in an email to customers.

Otis Chandler, founder of Goodreads, launched Smash Last Juneaims to use AI and the community to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts and social media posts from around the web. The app allows users to pursue their interests, submit content, vote for suggested content, and show their relevance. There were also AI-powered bots that could answer questions and summaries.

The company said in an email that seven employees are working on the product. Smashing raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several angel investors.

Thankfully, there are a lot of startups tackling the issue. I like news readers with AI breaking news and particleand aggregator-like feeds FEEED, Tapestry and leader – Choose a few.

Smashing’s closure comes after Instagram co-founder shuts down Last year, AI-powered news app artifact and Finally, I sold the technology to Yahoo..