Yahoo Acquires 17-Year-Old's News Startup

On Monday, Yahoo announced it has acquired mobile news aggregator Summly, the latest in a string of acquisitions for mobile product talent.

Summly is an iPhone app designed to allow users to quickly find news they're interested in. It aggregates and displays snapshots of articles from a variety of news sources using artifical intelligence and natural language processing (more about that here). Users can separate them into customizable categories, like "Art and Design" or "Apple."

Summly was founded in late 2011 out of the London home of Nick D'Aloisio, who was then 15. D'Aloisio raised a $300,000 seed round of funding that September form Li Ka-shing and Horizons Ventures, and raised a second, $1.23 million round of funding a year later from a long roster of diverse and recognizable names, including Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono and Wendy Murdoch. D'Aloisio says more than 90 million summaries have been read through the app since its launch in November 2012.