A team of former Twitter programmers is reimagining how AI might help consumers comprehend news and information. Over the weekend, Particle.news entered private beta as a startup that claims to offer a personalized, “multi-perspective” news reading experience that uses AI to summarize the news and fairly compensates authors and publishers.
Particle’s economic model is unknown, but it comes at a time when AI is threatening a diminishing journalism environment. AI-summarized news may lower publisher website traffic and advertising revenue.
Last year, former Twitter Senior Director of Product Management Sara Beykpour, who led the experimental app twttr and worked on Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and discussions, established the firm. From 2015 to 2021, she rose from software developer to senior director of product management at Twitter. She co-founded it with Marcel Molina, a former Twitter and Tesla senior engineer. 
Last month, Beykpour highlighted that Particle uses AI to make news simpler to follow.
We sometimes feel like headlines are all we have time for. We want to comprehend more, quicker,” she said in a Threads startup introduction. “We’re in the early stages of using AI to transform news interaction.”
Particle gives news readers a bulleted overview of the story from several sources. When unveiling the private beta, Beykpour said readers may use the summary to catch up or go deeper to “learn about how a story has unfolded over time.”
The firm acquired $4.4 million in initial investment from Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures, and angel investors, including Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams and Behance founder Scott Belsky. This round ended on April 20, 2023.
Belsky said on X, “Particle has become a daily app for me. It synthesizes multiple articles (and views) on a news issue, displays the important ideas objectively, and enables you to dive further across several dimensions. He remarked, “A great example of daily AI in the abstraction era ahead.”
The Particle website shows logged-out readers a demo of its technology, along with articles’ summaries, update timings, and sources at the bottom.
These sources include 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, and others from across the political spectrum. Demos show that international outlets are used when relevant. However, each bullet point is not connected to its source, making it impossible to fact-check the AI summary without reading all the articles. (Key words are connected.) Also, news summary photos are watermarked with the publisher’s logo.
Since Particle is recruiting a senior iOS developer and beginning its private beta for testing, the eventual product may change.
Instagram’s co-founders’ now-shuttered firm Artifact used a similar concept of aggregating news sources and summarizing using AI. Artifact’s staff pre-selected news sources based on honesty and quality. For instance, the outlet has to quickly clarify mistakes and disclose sponsorship. Nearer to launch, we’ll discuss how Particle evaluates its sources.
Bulletin, another AI-powered news app, just debuted to combat clickbait and provide news summaries.
Given the interest in this field, Particle’s founding team may stand out. From Twitter, the co-founders know a real-time news ecosystem and have the technical and design knowledge to develop a good solution. Whether publishers that believe AI is stealing their space will feel “fairly compensated,” however, is unknown.
Adverb Ventures co-founder and managing director April Underwood complimented Particle’s investment on LinkedIn:
“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 Sunday. Adverb completed its $75 million Fund I two months earlier. Sara and Marcel are the sort of entrepreneurs we wanted to support when we started a new early-stage business. They target a major issue. They can solve large difficulties with high-quality products. They can recruit bright people and create future customers they don’t know they want, Underwood wrote.
Underwood told Eltrys about the offer in an email:
AI will affect every area of people’s digital lives at work and home, we think. Given the pre-existing conditions—it’s hard to obtain breaking news from reliable sources, and the social media environment is fast changing—you have to think that news consumption will change in a few years. Sara and Marcel are ideally prepared to serve current news consumers.
Beykpour tells Eltrys that the difficulties in getting news and staying current served as the inspiration for Particle. The company is still speaking with publishers to find out what they require from AI for summarizing their work.
We’re working it out. We’re working with publishers to determine the best model, she adds. “But I want to make it fair.”
After 15 years with Beykpour, investor Steve Jang was eager to support her and the team’s AI news reading research.
“The benefit of AI is that it can do things no human can do,” he says. “It synthesizes publicly available information and data to enhance understanding of a topic. It may provide a natural language experience that is instantly digestible and understandable. It may support secondary discovery—the inquiry you would want to perform to learn more,” Jang says.
So AI in this context is a collection of LLMs that really perform a lot of the heavy work to give you that completeness, understanding, and depth immediately—that was incredibly hard to achieve before,” he says.
The business anticipates further updates in the coming months. In the meantime, sign up for Particle’s beta.
