Startup Deep Dive : Inshorts — profitable in 2017, now losing over Rs 200 crore a year

In November 2017, a news app that fits every story into 60 words turned its first operating profit, on a revenue run rate that had jumped from ₹3 crore to ₹25 crore in a single year. Seven years later, the same company posted a net loss of ₹227.8 crore on revenue that had barely moved.

Inshorts is not struggling because reading habits changed. It is struggling because it tried to become something bigger than a 60-word news app, built a second product to do it, and has spent every year since paying for that bet.

Quick facts

What they do

Inshorts sells attention back to itself, in two forms. The first is the app most people know it for: a feed of news stories rewritten into exactly 60 words each, built for a reader who wants headlines without the article, and monetised through advertising that sits inside that feed. The second is Public, a separate app launched in 2019-20, which is not a news product at all but a hyperlocal social network: users in a town or neighbourhood record and share local video and text updates, and other users nearby see them by GPS location rather than by follower graph. Both products chase the same reader, a mobile-first Indian user who wants information in bite-sized, vernacular, visual form rather than a long-form article, and both are ultimately paid for by brands that want to reach that reader cheaply and at scale.

The origin

Inshorts began on 23 March 2013 as a Facebook page called News in Shorts, started by Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Pandey, then classmates at IIT Delhi, together with Deepit Purkayastha, then a student at IIT Kharagpur. The page did one simple thing: it took the news of the day and rewrote each story as a 60-word summary with a link back to the original source. There was no funding, no company and no office; it was three engineering students testing whether readers who had stopped finishing news articles would still read sixty words of one. The page found an audience fast enough that within months the trio were admitted to Times Internet’s TLabs startup accelerator, and the Facebook experiment was turned into a standalone mobile app before the end of 2013, according to Wikipedia’s account of the company’s founding. By December 2014 the app had crossed 100,000 subscribers, and by early 2016 Forbes India reported the founders’ claim of roughly 3 million daily subscribers, a scale-up driven almost entirely by readers sharing individual 60-word stories rather than by paid marketing.

The struggle years

The two hardest stretches in Inshorts’ history are not about the news product losing readers. They are about what happened when the company tried to grow beyond it.

The first came in the years around the launch of Public. Company filings analysed by Entrackr in August 2021 show that in FY19 (year ended March 2019) Inshorts was a small, profitable business: revenue of about $6.93 million and a net profit of roughly $3.9 million, an operating margin of close to 1.9%. A year later, in FY20, revenue had grown a healthy 64% to about $11.4 million, but the company swung to a net loss of roughly $14 million, an operating margin of about minus 91.5%. The swing coincided with Inshorts pouring money into building Public into a mass hyperlocal app; growth in the new product came at the direct cost of the profit the news business had spent years earning.

The second stretch is more recent and shows up in two numbers Inc42 and Entrackr have tracked from the company’s own filings: revenue growth essentially stalled, from ₹166 crore in FY22 to ₹180.9 crore in FY23 to ₹181.4 crore in FY24, a rise of less than 1% in the final year, while the net loss for FY23 ballooned to ₹309.7 crore, nearly a third worse than FY22’s ₹232 crore loss. Alongside the widening losses, Inc42 reported in 2024 that Inshorts’ monthly app downloads fell 35% between September and November 2023, then recovered only 18% by February 2024 to an average of about 3.1 lakh downloads a month, well behind rival Dailyhunt’s roughly 13 lakh. The company responded by cutting costs hard rather than by raising fresh money: advertising and promotional spend was cut 65.1% year-on-year in FY24, from ₹135.2 crore to ₹47.2 crore, and headcount eased from about 986 employees to about 898 over the same period, according to Inc42’s analysis of the FY24 filing. There is no independently confirmed report of a formal, named layoff round at Inshorts in that period; the reduction shows up in the filings as lower employee and headcount numbers rather than as a public announcement.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after moment in Inshorts’ history is not a funding round. It is November 2017, the month the company says it turned operationally profitable for the first time. According to the company’s own statement, carried by PR Newswire on 18 January 2018, Inshorts’ net revenue run rate jumped from ₹3 crore in 2016 to ₹25 crore in 2017, an eightfold rise driven almost entirely by advertising after the app ran its first paid ad in July 2016. By the start of 2018 the company said it was working with more than 200 advertising brands, including Vodafone, OnePlus, Mercedes and Myntra, adding roughly 10 new advertisers a month, and was targeting ₹100 crore of revenue for FY18. That was a small, disciplined media business that had found a working ad model on a low cost base.

The company never returned to that kind of profitability after it began investing heavily in Public from 2019 onward. The contrast is stark: a ₹3 crore to ₹25 crore run-rate jump powered the company into the black in 2017; by FY23 the company was losing more than ten times that first profitable year’s entire revenue base every twelve months. The turning point, in other words, cuts both ways, it is the moment Inshorts proved its core model worked, and the fork in the road after which it chose to fund a second, much more expensive bet with the profits from the first.

The money behind it

Inshorts built its early capital base from India’s most recognisable startup names. A 2014 seed round brought in Times Internet along with Flipkart co-founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal as individual investors, alongside Gaurav Bhatnagar, Ankush Nijhawan and Manish Dhingra, according to funding trackers reviewed for this piece. In 2015, Tiger Global led financing that Forbes India reported at about $24 million across two rounds that year, with the Bansals and Japan’s Rebright Partners also participating; Tiger Global went on to become one of the company’s largest institutional backers.

The company’s most recent disclosed round was in July 2021: a $60 million raise led by Vy Capital, with Addition, SIG Global India Fund, A91 Emerging Fund and Tanglin Venture Partners also writing checks, as reported by Business Standard and Inventiva at the time. Press coverage of the round pegged the resulting valuation at about $550 million, though Entrackr’s own analysis of the transaction documents a month later, in August 2021, estimated a lower post-money figure of roughly $450-470 million; the company itself did not disclose a valuation, so both figures are reported estimates rather than a confirmed number. That same Entrackr analysis of the round’s shareholding put Addition at 29.12% of the company, SIG Global India at 18.40%, Tiger Global at 17.40%, A91 Partners at 11.65% and Vy Capital at 9.02%, with the three founders and the employee stock pool together holding under 6%, a cap table in which venture investors, not the founders, hold the overwhelming majority of the company. Total funding raised is itself reported inconsistently across trackers, Crunchbase-style data underlying Wikipedia’s entry puts it at $119 million across six rounds, while Tracxn’s count puts it at roughly $165 million; neither figure has been confirmed by the company.

What each backer changed: Times Internet’s TLabs accelerator, in 2013, gave three college students a route from a Facebook page to an incorporated company with mentorship and desk space. Tiger Global’s 2015 money funded the jump from a niche reading app to a mass-market one during the era when the founders say daily subscribers reached the low millions. The 2021 Vy Capital-led round, raised deliberately including a $7.34 million secondary sale that let early shareholders including the founders partly cash out, came right as the company was absorbing the cost of building Public, and effectively bankrolled that expansion rather than the older news business.

How it makes money

Inshorts earns almost entirely from advertising, not subscriptions. Brands buy a 60-word native ad slot formatted to look like an editorial story in the feed, typically bundled with sponsored content under an annual contract, and are billed on a mix of impressions and engagement such as likes and shares, according to industry coverage of the ad product. Advertising has historically made up the large majority of group revenue; in FY23, for instance, advertising revenue was reported at ₹147 crore against ₹181 crore of total revenue, meaning non-advertising lines, including Public’s own monetisation, made up the rest. Costs run in the opposite direction: the single biggest cost line is content, editorial and technology support, which Entrackr reported at ₹193 crore in FY23, well ahead of the ₹79 crore spent on employee benefits that year, because Inshorts pays to rewrite, license and structure large volumes of daily news rather than to build it from scratch. The part most readers get wrong is that Inshorts is not primarily a subscription or reader-pays product at any scale; it makes its money the way a low-cost television channel does, selling attention in small, repeatable slots to brands, which is also why a slowdown in advertiser budgets or in daily app opens shows up in its revenue line almost immediately, with no subscription base to cushion it.

The numbers

Revenue has been close to flat for three straight years while losses have swung sharply, based on company filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42:

The FY24 improvement was driven almost entirely by cost discipline rather than growth: total expenditure fell 16.4% even as revenue rose only 0.3%, and reported EBITDA loss narrowed from about ₹261 crore in FY23 to about ₹143.3 crore in FY24, an EBITDA margin that moved from about minus 144% to about minus 79%, still deeply negative on both counts.

Where the money comes from

The group’s revenue is really two businesses layered together, and the split is where the surprise sits. The Inshorts app itself is the older, smaller and comparatively disciplined earner, built on advertising sold against a fixed daily feed of 60-word stories. Public, the hyperlocal app, is the newer and far more expensive line: it was built for scale first and monetisation later, expanding from about 10 million users within six months of its 2019-20 launch to more than 50 million active users by 2021 as it rode a wave of pandemic-era demand for local, vernacular video, according to coverage of the app’s growth at the time. That user growth, though, is exactly what widened the group’s losses through FY19-FY20 and again through FY22-FY23; Public’s expansion costs, not the mature Inshorts news feed, are the main reason group-level losses have consistently run several multiples above group-level revenue. The geographic and language surprise sits inside Public specifically: unlike the English-first Inshorts app, Public was built around non-English, tier-II and tier-III India, the opposite end of the market from where Inshorts made its first profit in 2017.

The risks

Three risks sit directly in Inshorts’ own numbers and public statements, rather than in speculation about the news business generally.

The first is regulatory. Inc42’s reporting on the company’s 2023-24 pivot toward influencer- and creator-style content noted that aggregating unverified social posts and individual opinions alongside curated news risks blurring the line intermediary rules under India’s Information Technology Act, 2021 draw between user-generated content and journalism, a line regulators have grown stricter about policing. The second is advertiser concentration risk from a slowing core product: the same Inc42 reporting found monthly downloads had fallen 35% in a three-month stretch in late 2023 before only partially recovering, at a time when advertising is still the group’s dominant revenue source, so any further decline in daily active use falls straight through to the top line with no other buffer. The third is structural: the FY21 cap table shows founders and employees holding under 6% of the company against a group of venture investors holding the rest, which means big strategic calls, including whether to keep funding Public’s losses, whether to sell the group to a larger media company, or whether to pursue a domestic listing, sit largely with financial investors rather than the operating founders, a dynamic that can push a loss-making asset toward either a forced sale or a sharper, faster cut to spending than an owner-operator might choose.

The takeaway

Inshorts’ history says something more specific than “diversification is risky.” It says that a profitable low-cost media product and a high-growth consumer social product run on fundamentally different economics, and funding the second out of the first’s margins does not average out, it just delays the reckoning. The company turned its first profit in 2017 on a lean, ad-only news feed; every year since it decided to also fund Public’s user growth, group losses have run several multiples of that entire profitable business’s revenue. The lesson for any founder sitting on one working, modestly profitable product is that a second, much bigger bet needs its own capital and its own patience horizon, because it will not simply ride on the first product’s economics, it will consume them.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Inshorts and when?

Inshorts was started on 23 March 2013 as a Facebook page called News in Shorts by Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Pandey, then IIT Delhi classmates, together with Deepit Purkayastha, then a student at IIT Kharagpur. It was turned into a standalone app later that year after the trio joined Times Internet’s TLabs accelerator.

How does Inshorts make money?

Almost entirely through advertising: brands buy 60-word native ad slots styled like editorial stories, usually bundled with sponsored content on annual contracts and billed on impressions and engagement. Advertising made up ₹147 crore of Inshorts’ ₹181 crore total revenue in FY23, according to Entrackr’s reporting.

What is Inshorts’ current valuation?

There is no confirmed current valuation. The last disclosed funding round, in July 2021, was reported by Business Standard and Inventiva at a valuation of about $550 million, while Entrackr’s own filings-based analysis a month later estimated a lower post-money figure of roughly $450-470 million. No new funding round has been publicly reported since.

Is Inshorts profitable?

No. The company was operationally profitable in and after November 2017 on a small, ad-only news business, but has been loss-making at the group level since it began investing in the Public app around 2019, posting a net loss of ₹227.8 crore in FY24 on revenue of ₹181.4 crore.

What is the Public app and how is it related to Inshorts?

Public is a separate hyperlocal social and video app built by the Inshorts team and launched in 2019-20, aimed at non-English, tier-II and tier-III Indian users who share local updates by GPS location rather than by following a feed. It grew fast, past 50 million active users by 2021, but its expansion costs are the main reason the wider Inshorts group has stayed loss-making.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Wikipedia, “Inshorts” entry, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Inshorts’ FY24 Loss Declines 26% To INR 228 Cr”, December 2024
• Entrackr, “InShorts posts Rs 310 Cr loss in FY23 with flat scale”, November 2023
• Entrackr, “In short, all about InShorts’ latest round, shareholding, secondary and financials”, August 2021
• Business Standard, “Inshorts raises $60 million from Vy Capital and existing investors”, July 2021
• Inventiva, “Inshorts Raises USD 60 Million From Vy Capital, Existing Investors”, July 2021
• Forbes India, “30 Under 30: Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha & Anunay Pandey — Delivering news in shorts”, February 2016
• Inc42, “News in Shorts Rebrands As inshorts”, 2015
• PR Newswire, “Inshorts Becomes Profitable; Advertising Drives Revenue for the News Aggregator”, 18 January 2018
• Inc42, “Inshorts ‘Pivots’ From News To Influencer Content In Push For Growth, Engagement”, 2024
• Inc42 / KrAsia, reporting on Public app’s $41 million funding round led by A91 Partners, and subsequent user-growth coverage, 2020-2021

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