A 17-year-old Londoner has sold his app company to Yahoo for £18million.
Nick D'Aloisio, the creator and founder of an app called Summly – which provides bite-sized summaries of content from news and other sites – closed the deal on Monday. The price tag is reported by news site All Things Digital as £18m, comprising £16.2m in cash and £1.8m in Yahoo stock, though other sources said it could be up to £40m. D'Aloisio wouldn't comment.
The company, also called Summly, is being scooped up by Yahoo, one of the oldest names on the web. Yahoo called Summly "a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise." The Summly app, it said, "started with an insight – that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance.
"The buyout, is an unexpected success for British efforts to kickstart a new technology revolution through efforts such as Tech City in Old Street roundabout, London – known as "silicon roundabout". However, Summly isn't based there, but is in south-west London where D'Aloisio lives.
He got the idea for the app in 2011 when revising for his exams and finding himself frustrated with web pages that broadly repeated the same content. He produced an early version of Summly, called Trimit, which was downloaded more than 200,000 times and came to the attention of Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing. External investors have bought a third of the company's share capital, according to documents filed at Companies House last October.
This young man has hammered already. Go D'Aloisio!
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