StartX a big needle in Haystack

Stanford StartX Fund has backed Haystack TV, a streaming news service, in a seed round worth $1.7m.

Other backers in the round include Inspovation Ventures, DeltaG Ventures, SGH Capital, and individual backers.

Incubated at the StartX accelerator in 2013 and launched last year, Haystack is looking to capitalise on the move away from appointment-based TV to online streaming services while keeping a focus on news broadcasts. Essentially a news aggregator, Haystack pulls clips from 150 news organisations who publish to YouTube, and then delivers it to Android and Apple mobile platforms. The service is also one of Google’s 28 launch partners for Android TV, set to be launched later this year.

Co-founder Ish Harshawat said the team came up with the idea after moving away from regular TV news, but became frustrated with the lack of options in watching news online.

Explaining the motivation to create a service which can scan, analyse, and prepare curated news content for users, Harshawat told news provide TechCrunch: “We tried to use YouTube, but it was really hard to find current news, and it’s not very good at surfacing trending video and then putting it together in a user experience that’s easy to use.”