It seems like Ben-Bassat (who was previously an executive at Blizzard Entertainment and a board member at Wix) managed to win some of those investors over — he’s raised $3 million in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Sequoia Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, Boldstart Ventures and various angels.
So what’s Gong doing that’s different? Ben-Bassat classified previous attempts to deliver personalized news into two buckets. First, there are the social networks themselves, which he said were “not built for news” — which is one of the reasons why they’re struggling to fight back against fake news and clickbait.
Second, there are apps that try to identify your interests, then use semantic analysis to determine which articles will be relevant to you — an approach that Ben-Bassat described as “very cold.”
Ben-Bassat said his team at Gong is combining the two approaches, looking at how stories spread across social media and combining that with the behavior of individual readers, creating what it calls the HackRank algorithm. The goal is to predict which story will be interesting to you, even before it’s become a huge story on other sites.
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