(Worth a read: Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Ev Williams’ discussion with TC founder Mike Arrington, after Arrington initially reported rumors of the deal. Twitter had just 12 employees at the time, and Summize has six, so it was a significant deal for the two. Summize was in fact Twitter’s first search engine, and in 2008 Twitter acquired it to integrate that functionality directly into the platform. ![]() Then after leaving AOL, along with other ex-AOL’ers, Chowdhry and Jensen founded Summize, a search engine taking a new approach to search using content produced by internet users as its guide, which eventually trained its eyes on one juicy dataset in particular, that of the up-and-coming social site Twitter. The two first worked together years ago at AOL when it was still a major homepage destination trying to contend with the rising star of Google. Image Credits: Aura (opens in a new window)Ĭhowdhury and his co-founder Eric Jensen (pictured above with Jensen on the left), who is Aura’s CTO, are friends that go back a long way in the search for using technology to connect people with information and to each other. Under new owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter’s talent pool has been leaking heavily for the last couple of weeks through both layoffs and resignations, leaving a lot of question marks over not just what happens with Twitter itself, but also one another: Among the thousands who have left, who will play a part in whatever might be the next chapter? It’s an open-ended question, one that Chowdhury can provide at least one answer by example. He added that its devices currently are collectively showing some 1 billion pictures to people daily. Sales of frames have numbered close to 1 million, with the company’s newest design, the $149 Carver, currently its top seller.Īura’s frames typically have around four people on average connected to them for adding pictures, which creates a network effect of sorts, Chowdhury said eventually some of those users get their own frames and build out additional networks of contributors uploading pictures to the new devices, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, the company has been growing at a snappy pace - 100% year on year for at least the last three, with app users going from 1 million in December 2021 to 2 million by September 2022 and on track to hit 3 million in January. It hasn’t been looking to raise more equity-based funding although CEO and co-founder Abdur Chowdhury said it might do something in the coming year, pending the state of the venture market (it’s been a tough 2021 and investors predict that’s likely to continue for a while, so we shall see). The company has raised $26 million in a mix of debt and equity led by Lago Innovation Fund, money that the company is using to boost manufacturing this quarter and to invest in 2023 plans.Īura - not to be confused with the meditation and mental wellness app, nor the cybersecurity company, nor the biotech company of the same name - had previously raised around $13 million in equity from investors (per PitchBook) that include Spark Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks and DCVC, as well as a quiet, unreported investment from the Chicago-based Levy Family Office (led by the entrepreneur Larry Levy). Aura, a startup founded by early Twitter employees that makes digital frames and photo sharing apps that can also be used to update those frames, has pulled in some funding to expand its business as it closes in on three million users of its app and 1 million frames sold (it’s now at 997,000).
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