News Break Announces $115m in Series C Funding led by Francisco Partners
News Break Announces $115m in Series C Funding led by Francisco Partners
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jan. 07, 2021 News Break, The Nation’s No. 1 Intelligent Local News App, today announced it has closed a $115 million round in Series C funding led by Francisco Partners, a leading global investment firm that specializes in partnering with technology businesses. Francisco Partners will gain a seat on News Break’s Board of Directors. The investment makes News Break one of the first new unicorns of 2021.
News Break has previously raised more than $36 million from investors including IDG Capital, who have also participated in this latest round.
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The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in global consumer spend in 2019. Consumer spend also hit a record $112 billion across iOS and Android alone.
Not including third-party Chinese app stores, iOS and Android users downloaded 130 billion apps in 2020. Due to COVID-19, time spent in apps jumped 25% year-over-year on Android.
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Ex-Yahoo exec's News Break startup gets unicorn valuation in $115M funding bizjournals.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bizjournals.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The round was led by
Francisco Partners, which will gain a seat on News Break’s Board of Directors.
The company, which previously raised more than $36m from investors including IDG Capital, intends to use the funds to increase its investments in the local-content ecosystem both in the United States, and internationally, and expand its leadership, business, product, and engineering teams.
Founded in 2015 by Jeff Zheng with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang as Advisor, News Break provides an intelligent app which makes local information available, connecting and empowering local users, content creators, and advertisers. The investment follows the reach of 12 million daily active users.
The BBC News app was downloaded 2.2 million times in 2020 making it the most popular newly-installed news app in the UK during the year. The mobile apps of other big name publishers proved similarly popular.
Sky’s news app was the second most popular with 1.1 million downloads, while the Guardian and Mail Online’s news app were also among the top ten most downloaded, according to Press Gazette’s analysis of data provided by mobile app marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
In third place was Reach’s local news aggregator In Your Area.
The Sun’s news app, while making the top 15, had fewer downloads than other big name news brands with 0.2 million installs. The highly popular Apple news app, which comes pre-installed on iPhones, did not appear in the data due to Apple security rules.