Mobile App Startup Blinkist Pulls $4.3 Million in Venture Capital

Blinkist isn’t the first mobile app or web service to try their hand at content summarization (previous efforts from other startups have summarized Ted Talks, classic fiction, and white papers) but they may be the first mobile app developers to find mainstream success with the concept. The German mobile app development startup recently raised over $4 million USD to bring their quickly growing app to a wider audience.

Blinkist company statements indicate that the funding will go towards growing their marketing and publisher partnerships, as well as keep their mobile app developers busy creating new products and features for their user base.

The $4 million total in venture funding came on top of a previous $2 million round, with this second round turning heads in the startup scene as Greycroft Partners sunk in a considerable investment. Roundtree has a background in picking highly viable investments like Huffington Post, Klout, and Babble, so Chicago mobile app developers have good reason to bet that Blinkist has a good chance of scaling well beyond their current user base of around 30,000.

The basic concept of Blinkist is simple, but compelling: human-generated abridged versions of popular nonfiction books that can be consumed in 15 minutes or less. It’s a premise that holds promise for mobile app developers in the age of content overload, giving users the chance to catch up on all those books they want to read, but otherwise might not have time to. User testimonials on the site also highlight a valuable use case in work-related reading.

Blinkist’s premium features come at a steeper price tag than the average freemium app offering ($50 for a one-year subscription). However, considering the human labor component of the startup’s operation costs (each abridged version is hand-crafted by a Blinkist writer with subject area expertise), the price is pretty reasonable for the value it offers. Maintaining a large employee base beyond core mobile app developers can be tricky for some startups, but if the investors have anything to say about it Blinkist could have what it takes to scale gracefully towards profitability.