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Smashing, the reading curation app by Goodreads’ founder, shuts down
Building an app dedicated to helping people aggregate and read news, articles, and social media posts in one place is apparently a tough proposition these days. Smashing, an AI-powered app that lets users curate the news and posts they’d like to read, has announced it will be shutting down.
In a statement, the company said that it simply didn’t grow fast enough to keep going and wasn’t able to scale into a sustainable product. GoodReads’ founder Otis Chandler launched Smashing last June with the aim of using AI and community input to curate news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and social media posts from around the web.
The app allowed users to follow their interests, submit content, and vote on suggested content to indicate relevance. Additionally, it featured AI-powered summaries and a bot that could answer questions. Unfortunately, the company had to part ways with its seven employees who were working on the product.
Smashing had raised $3.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several angel investors.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/smashing-the-reading-curation-app-by-goodreads-founder-shuts-down/
