SoThree, the company behind Umano, a San Francisco, CA-based app that allows users to listen to articles on mobile devices, raised approximately $1m in seed funding.
The round was co-led by Birchmere Ventures and Digital Garage, with participation from early Facebook advisor Karl Jacob and angels including several Google employees.
The company intends to use the funds to scale development, expanding its team of voice actors and available content.
Co-founded by Ian Mendiola, CEO, Anton Lopyrev, and Prabhdeep Gill, Umano offers a news broadcast (not a robotic, text-to-speech translator) with a variety of curated articles, which are read by professional voice actors.
The service just launched a new feature, Umano Collections, which creates personalized playlists for listeners around specific topics or themes, as well as new social features including the ability to comment on articles, view the top trending articles based on current social activity (comments, shares, and likes), see all notifications, and improved accessibility of the app on iOS to improve the experience for visually impaired users.
Umano is available for free download on iTunes and Google Play.
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FinSMEs
11/07/2013