Happy ending for Storyful funding

STORYFUL, THE online news service founded by RTÉ presenter Mark Little, has closed a round of seed investment led by technology entrepreneur Ray Nolan.

Enterprise Ireland and other private investors participated in the fundraising.

Little declined to say how much the company had raised, citing investor confidentiality, but he said the funding would see Storyful through to the end of the year and allow it to “prove the concept”.

Enterprise Ireland invests, on average, €250,000 in start-ups and matches private sector funding, so the sum raised is likely to be in the region of €500,000.

Co-presenter of RTÉ's Prime Time, Little took a leave of absence from the broadcaster in late 2009 to establish Storyful.

It provides tools and services to help news organisations find relevant content on social networks such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook relating to breaking news stories. Google’s YouTube subsidiary used Storyful to showcase videos of the protests in Egypt on its CitizenTube channel.

Storyful intends to launch its first “news curation” tool for public use next month to tie in with its attendance at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Texas.

Mr Nolan was a founder of Web Reservations International (WRI), the online budget accommodation booking service behind hostelworld.com and hostels.com. It was sold to US private equity firm Hellman Friedman for €202.5 million in 2009. Mr Nolan was the chief beneficiary of that sale. He is currently chief executive of Worky.com, an online recruitment business.

Mr Nolan said he was extremely excited about the potential impact a service like Storyful could have on the news media.

“This is the future of news; taking blogs and Twitter and having them moderated by people who know how to moderate,” said Mr Nolan. “This provides a happy medium between professional journalism and the new social media.”

Storyful has a “core team of six staff”, said Little, and the investment will enable it to “recruit internationally”.