InPress
Setting the Scene
News organizations are losing both their customers and their ability to understand them, with no clear way to recover intent, loyalty, or lifetime value.
Meanwhile, the average American reads fewer than one article per day, and Gen Z averages just 0.5 per week, creating a massive generational drop-off in news engagement.
At the same time, consuming news has become an isolating activity, where algorithms are incentivized to put users in an echo chamber.
This week's company flips the model: giving users a low-friction, gamified way to engage with journalism, with each other, and giving publishers access to structured emotional and behavioral data.
In a Sentence
InPress is a gamified news app that helps users build media literacy, connect with one another, and give publishers real-time audience insights.
App: A mobile-first platform delivering swipeable, AI-generated news summaries ("Gists") that lower friction and boost engagement with factual journalism.
Connect: Users engage with news collaboratively, rating articles, and discovering others with similar subconscious interests.
Insights: Every article interaction produces structured behavioral data, enabling publishers to better understand intent, sentiment, and engagement.
Bulleted Version:
- Similar to how Duolingo builds habits through gamification and dating apps use swipes to spark connection, InPress turns news into a daily game where users swipe through articles, grow their media literacy, and connect through shared curiosity.
The Basics
- Headquarters: Brooklyn, NY
- Employee Count: 2 FTEs
- Investors:
- Funding amount: ~$200k
- Business model: B2C (subscriptions, microtransactions), B2B (data & insights), B2B2C (ads)
- Early traction: Users average 9.3 articles read + rated per day (vs. weekly Gen Z avg of 0.5), spend 8.41m per session (beating TikTok and Instagram), are 16 years younger than the typical U.S. news subscriber, 7.8K downloads, 78K articles read, and 179K article ratings.
Due Diligence
WHAT WE LIKE
Market opportunity: InPress sits at the convergence of news, social, and gamified learning, creating multiple monetization paths across consumer, enterprise, and data channels.
Article Ranking: Turning passive reading into structured data is a huge value for publishers who partner with InPress.
Engagement Engine: Media literacy becomes a habit-forming game loop, driving daily use and long-term retention rarely seen in the news category.
POTENTIAL RISKS
Dominance of Existing Platforms: While InPress creates a great alternative, most people now consume news via social platforms, which could limit distribution and cultural adoption.
Unproven Social Behavior: It's still unclear whether Gen Z actually wants to connect through news, even if their engagement signals curiosity and intent.
Incumbent Copy Risk: Major players like Apple News could replicate core features like swiping, rating, and gamified literacy, diluting InPresss differentiation.
Founder Profile
Adam Harder, CEO: Former broadcast journalist in the U.S. Air Force turned tech marketer, leading video and growth initiatives at 2U, DigitalOcean, and Isovalent before founding InPress.
Alex Long, CTO: Former Senior Research Engineer at Sophos with prior visualization and ML work.
Comps
Why InPress
By turning news into a habit, engagement into data, and layering on a social experience, with traction to back it up, we're impressed.
