Nick D’Aloisio: Summly

Nick D’Aloisio, 17
Company: Summly
Web: http://summly.com/index.html

Nick D’Aloisio puts most teenagers to shame. Less than six months after launching an app created in his bedroom, 17-year-old D’Aloisio then sold it in an estimated £19m deal to digital giant Yahoo!.  Before being absorbed into its acquirer, the business in question, Summly, was a mobile app service offering “pocket-sized news for iPhones”. In other words it automatically generated bite-sized summaries of websites’ articles, including from the Wall Street Journal and ESPN. Partnered with Apple and Newscorp, the app launched in November 2012 and reached 500,000 downloads in its first month, featuring as the number one news app in 28 countries and was named Apple’s best app of 2012. The technology made D’Aloisio one of the youngest ever to secure venture capital, raising $1.23m funding in a deal led by Horizon Ventures and a series of high profile angel investors such as Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono. Now removed from the Apple store and undergoing development at Yahoo!, D’Aloisio has joined Yahoo!’s London Tech City hub and is set on “building more exciting products inspired by Summly”. Expect him to make waves in the technology sphere sometime soon.