Curio

Curio was a London-based digital media platform founded in 2016 by Govind Balakrishnan and Srikant C (Srikant Chakravarti). The founders identified an opportunity to address information overload and provide a solution for consuming high-quality journalism in an audio format. Govind Balakrishnan's experience at the BBC, where he observed that powerful journalism struggled with engagement, was a key motivator for the company's creation. The company's mission was to make trusted, high-quality journalism accessible to busy individuals while generating revenue for publishers.

The company operated on a B2C subscription-based business model, offering users access to narrated articles from a wide range of premium publications through its mobile application. Curio established partnerships with over 50 media outlets, including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and The Economist. The platform provided human-narrated, word-for-word audio versions of articles, allowing users to listen to content without advertisements or paywalls from multiple sources under a single subscription. Users could browse content by topic, publication, or duration and listen offline. In 2023, the company introduced a tool that enabled users to create their own trusted podcasts on any subject, which received praise from public figures like Bill Gates.

Curio secured a total of $8.96 million in funding over three rounds. A significant Series A funding round in September 2020 raised $8.96 million, led by Earlybird Venture Capital. Other investors included Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, Horizons Ventures, and angel investor Chris Anderson. Over its lifespan, the company returned nearly $10 million to its publishing partners and was featured twice at Apple keynotes. Despite positive subscriber feedback, the founders announced the closure of Curio after eight years, citing the shifting landscape due to AI and competition from large tech companies as challenges to long-term sustainability for an independent entity. Following the closure, the founders began a new venture called Gibran, focused on building AI that augments human autonomy.

Keywords: audio journalism, news narration, subscription media, curated content, media aggregation, Govind Balakrishnan, Srikant Chakravarti, London startup, digital media platform, mobile news app, listen to articles, screen-free news, Earlybird Venture Capital, Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, paid journalism, audio content, news-as-audio, media-tech, ad-free news, publisher partnerships, long-form journalism