Snuggling up: Scroll acquires Nuzzel
Another day, another acquisition with potential Portland impact. Scroll, the “invite only and I don’t have an invite but appears to be working to make online content both profitable and ad free” startup that has its CTO and an office in Portland, is acquiring the news aggregation service Nuzzel.
Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel. We’re investing in keeping it running as an independent entity, and our first priority is not to screw that up, so don’t expect any major changes to the core service, beyond what we’re going to announce in this blog post. If you like the email digest, you’ll still get the email digest. If you love the app, it will still give you the best discovery experience around.
According to Techcrunch, there were any number of reasons the deal made sense.
[Tony] Haile said that by acquiring Nuzzel, Scroll can also start experimenting with different models for news curation — which is particularly important because if “we have just two algorithms determining who gets traffic and who doesn’t, then that’s not a healthy web ecosystem.”
“It’s really hard to [build] a scalable business as an amazing curation service,” he added. With Nuzzel, he hopes to “start finding ways in which we can build in that value and drive a new model for our user experience services.”
Details of the deal were not disclosed but Nuzzel had raised around $5 million to date.
For more information, see the Scroll blog post on the acquisition.
Want to connect with more awesome dots in the Portland startup community? Consider joining us over on Patreon ❤️
Originally published at siliconflorist.com on February 7, 2019.
