NDRC start-up NewsWhip, which claims to do the work of millions of editors, has raised somewhere in the region of US$1m in angel funding, according to reports.
TechCrunch reported this morning that NewsWhip raised the funding from Hal Philipp, founder and CEO of Quantum research Group, and Shane Naughton, founder of TaxStream.
NewsWhip’s technology tracks news published by about 5,000 English-language websites – more than 60,000 news stories a day.
It then gathers social data for each story, such as how many shares, likes and tweets it has garnered.
The company’s founders are CEO Paul Quigley, a lawyer by trade, and Andrew Mullaney, the company’s CTO, a computer engineer who previously worked with Accenture and who founded EasyDeals.
The two investors join Dublin’s National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) as investors in NewsWhip. NewsWhip won the NDRC investment in December 2011 at the Launchpad Accelerator ‘Lift Off’ event. NewsWhip did not disclose the amount of the funds raised.
Meanwhile, NewsWhip has unveiled a new-look site showing the world’s most popular news stories in real time.
The company has also invited newsrooms to try out Spike, a professional product NewsWhip has developed with input from the BBC, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post and others.
“Spike is a dashboard for newsrooms, showing which stories are trending – or are about to trend – from thousands of sources,” said Quigley in a statement.
“It helps editors and writers navigate the morass of social data to find the best stories and news events.”
