Smashing, an AI-powered news aggregator app that aimed to help users curate and read news, articles, and social media posts in one place, has announced its shutdown. The company cited its inability to scale rapidly enough as the primary reason for its closure, despite having raised $3.4 million in funding from prominent investors.

Founded by GoodReads' founder Otis Chandler last June, Smashing used AI and community curation to aggregate 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. It also featured AI-powered summaries and a bot that could answer questions. However, despite its innovative approach, the company struggled to grow its user base quickly enough to sustain its operations.

In an email to customers, the company stated, "We simply didn't grow fast enough to keep going. We weren't able to scale it into a sustainable product." The closure is a significant setback for the startup, which had a team of seven employees working on the product. The funding it received from investors such as True Ventures, Blockchange, Offline Ventures, Advancit Capital, Power of N Ventures, and several angel investors was not enough to overcome the scaling challenges.

Smashing's closure is not an isolated incident in the news aggregator space. Last year, Instagram's co-founders shut down their AI-powered news app Artifact, eventually selling the technology to Yahoo. The challenges faced by Smashing and Artifact highlight the difficulties of building a scalable and sustainable news aggregator platform.

However, the shutdown of Smashing does not mean that the problem it set out to address has gone away. There are still several startups working on AI-powered news readers and feed aggregator apps, such as Bulletin, Particle, Feeeed, Tapestry, and Reeder, among others. These startups will likely continue to innovate and improve their offerings, providing users with alternative solutions for aggregating and reading news and social media content.

The closure of Smashing serves as a reminder of the importance of scaling and growth in the startup ecosystem. Even with innovative ideas and significant funding, startups can still fail if they are unable to achieve rapid growth and scale their operations sustainably. As the news aggregator space continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see which startups can overcome the challenges faced by Smashing and build successful, scalable businesses.