NewsBreak

Former Yahoo executive Jeff Zheng founded NewsBreak (early on written News Break) in Silicon Valley in 2015.⁠[1]

NewsBreak launched in the US in 2015 as a subsidiary of the Chinese news aggregation app Yidian Zixun; both were founded by Jeff Zheng and share a 2015 US patent for a news-recommendation algorithm, “Interest Engine.”⁠[2]

With co-founder Ren Xuyang, Zheng aimed to replicate Yidian Zixun’s success abroad.⁠[3]

Since January 2019, NewsBreak has ranked No. 1 among free iPhone news apps on the US App Store several times.⁠[3]

In 2020, Harry Shum, the former head of Microsoft’s AI and Research Group, became chairman of NewsBreak’s board. At the time the company had 107 employees, 10 million daily and 23 million monthly active users, and content from 10,000 content providers and news organizations, and it planned an engineering center in the Seattle area.⁠[4]

On January 7, 2021, NewsBreak announced a new $115 million funding round led by Francisco Partners, which took a board seat, with participation from IDG Capital; the company had previously raised $36 million, did not disclose its valuation, and said it reached 12 million daily active users.⁠[5]

NewsBreak announced a new creator content policy effective April 1, 2021: content must contain facts and information, and fiction, pure venting posts and purely biased content would not be accepted; articles had to be at least 250 words, and entertainment, relationship-advice and opinion pieces would receive lower CV Scores and fewer impressions.⁠[6]

After the Georgia shootings, NewsBreak ran a #StopAsianHate content campaign; five selected writers each designated an Asian American and Pacific Islander organization to receive a $1,000 donation, for a total of $5,000.⁠[7]

NewsBreak announced 24 fellows for its 2021 NewsBreak Fellowship for Local Journalism, a paid 10-week program for students.⁠[8]

NewsBreak then had nearly 200 employees in the US; Phoenix New Media had once held a large but not majority stake in Particle Media, a stake since much reduced. Greg Vederman, vice president of brand marketing, said the company is an American business and that all US customer data is hosted on Amazon Web Services servers in the US.⁠[9]

A year after launching its Creator Program, NewsBreak expanded it into the Contributor Network, covering amateur writers, professional journalists, subject-matter experts and video creators, with three planned tiers and new editorial standards and guidelines.⁠[10]

In February 2022, NewsBreak hired Jim Bell, a former Today Show and Tonight Show producer, to oversee strategy. In Denver it employed reporters and an editor to publish original local news, the only city where it had paid staff; it also paid to republish content from outlets such as CBS4 and Axios Denver, and planned further pilots in Pennsylvania and Arizona.⁠[11]

On September 1, 2022, NewsBreak opened an office inside New York’s Empire State Building for its media team and East Coast sales team.⁠[12]

On October 18 that year, Scott Kelliher, who had managed client relationships with brands including eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry, Yahoo, AOLAOLAOL is an American internet brand offering a news portal, email, and membership services. Its history dates to an online-services company founded in 1985.Open the full entry and Time Inc., became head of revenue.⁠[13]

The NewsBreak app was certified by IAB Tech Lab for implementing the Open Measurement SDK through Prebid’s open-source framework; the company then said it had more than 50 million monthly users.⁠[1]

On December 27, 2023, NewsBreak ran a story about a shooting in a New Jersey town that local police said was AI-generated and false. In early 2024, a Colorado food bank said the app had published wrong food-distribution times, and a Pennsylvania charity said an AI-written article wrongly advertised its free medical clinics.⁠[14]

In January 2024, the news-site rating service NewsGuard gave NewsBreak a score of 12.5 out of 100. On April 29, general counsel Yiyi Jin disputed it, saying the content in question had been removed after being flagged; NewsGuard replied that the issues were addressed in its label.⁠[15]

After Reuters published an investigation into NewsBreak’s Chinese origins and AI errors, Senator Mark Warner and Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi and Elise Stefanik called for more scrutiny. NewsBreak said it has always been a US company; Francisco Partners said its stake is under 10%.⁠[2]

NewsBreak said it does not write the news and that local publishers can earn through an advertising revenue share; States Newsroom had worked with it since February 2022, and local outlets such as Mat-Su Sentinel and The Dakotan had joined.⁠[16]

On May 15, 2025, NewsBreak launched a beta of NBot, an AI agentic assistant that lets users adjust feed topics, locations, notification and ad settings in natural language and ask about local dining, traffic and events; it was initially limited to early-access users.⁠[17]

On May 29, NewsBreak announced that its real-time wildfire map, built with AI from multiple news sources, had won the new “Most Innovative Use of AI” award at LMA’s 2024 Digital Innovation Awards.⁠[18]

On July 24, 2025, NewsBreak earned Great Place to Work certification, with 84% of staff describing it as a great place to work.⁠[19]

That September, NewsBreak ranked 32nd globally on Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators list; the company then said it had more than 40 million monthly active users.⁠[20]

On May 6, 2026, NewsBreak introduced SPOTLIGHTS: small-business owners answer guided questions to produce an article about their business, which after review is published with hyperlocal targeting and pushed to nearby readers; sign-up includes one free feature article and push notification.⁠[21]

On May 8, the company described its personalized newsletters: more than 40 types, received by about 30 million people, with about 50 million sent daily, and the technology offered to publishers through the Aigeon platform.⁠[22]

On May 26, NewsBreak was named to the Fortune Best Workplaces in the Bay Area 2026 list.⁠[23]

Nicolas Zylberstein, who spent six years at ByteDance and worked on the early launch of TikTok Shop, became NewsBreak’s first chief business officer, leading growth across NewsBreak, Nearby AI and NDot AI.⁠[24]

Nearby AI, built by the team behind NewsBreak, helps homeowners describe problems at home, estimate local prices and check quotes, free of charge for homeowners.⁠[25]

NDot AI provides publishers with infrastructure for app and newsletter development, marketing, personalized recommendations, and advertising and subscription monetization.⁠[26]

In job listings NewsBreak describes itself as a “Content Intelligence platform” with more than 40 million monthly active users.⁠[27]

Its iOS app, developed by Particle Media Inc., is rated 4.8 on the US App Store from 1.4 million ratings and ranks sixth in the News chart.⁠[28]

NewsBreak: Official website: https://www.newsbreak.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

X: Official account: https://x.com/newsbreakApp (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Official account: https://www.linkedin.com/company/particle-media-inc (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

Nearby AI: Official website: https://nearby.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[25]

NDot AI: Official website: https://ndot.ai/ (opens in a new window)⁠[26]