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| Nick D’Aloisio, Founder of Summly |
On Tuesday, the world woke up to the news that Yahoo had acquired Summly, the news-summarizing app created by 17-year-old British Nick D’Aloisio. Yahoo reportedly bought the app, Summly, for $27 million in cash and $3 million in stock.
In true Summly fashion, I will keep this short and sweet.
I am delighted to announce Summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!. Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!’s global scale and expertise. After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people’s daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it’s the perfect fit.
When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly. I’d personally like to thank Li Ka-Shing and Horizons Ventures for having the foresight to back a teenager pursuing his dream. Also to our investors, advisors and of course the fantastic team for believing in the potential of Summly. Without you all, this never would have been possible. I’d also like to thank my family, friends and school for supporting me.
Most importantly, thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products – see this as a ‘power nap’ so to speak.
With over 90 million summaries read in just a few short months, this is just the beginning for our technology. As we move towards a more refined, liberated and intelligent mobile web, summaries will continue to help navigate through our ever expanding information universe.
Sincerely,
Nick
Founder
Even though Yahoo is paying such a huge amount to Nick, the Marissa Mayer-led company said it is killing the app (in fact it is already gone from the iOS App Store); so Yahoo isn’t buying an audience or a user base, either.
I hope this works out for Marissa and D’Aloisio since Marissa is determined to take Yahoo back to its exalted position in the industry.
