InPress 📰

Opening Remarks

This week I’ve been thinking about the thousands of founders that have pitched me. The best ones hold two conflicting truths:

1. They know exactly where they’re going.
2. They’re never satisfied with where they are.

That tension fuels everything. Now onto this week’s feature:

-Brett

Bulletpitch’s publication covers the hottest early-stage startup before being picked up by larger media outlets. If that’s you, apply here.

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 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.

The Basics

• Industry: Consumer Social, News Tech

• Headquarters: Brooklyn, NY

• Year Founded: 2023

• Employee Count: 2 FTEs

• Amount Raised: ~$200k

• Business Model: B2C (subscriptions, microtransactions), B2B (data & insights), B2B2C (ads)

• Early Traction: Users average 9.3 articles read and rated per day (vs. weekly Gen Z avg of 0.5), spend 8m 25s 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.

Sponsored Content*

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

• The Hustle isn't your typical stuffy business newsletter.

• It's a fun, 5-minute daily dose of the growth stories, tech innovations, and trends that smart professionals actually need to know.

• Join 1.5M+ readers who've ditched boring news for insights that keep them sharp and ahead of the curve. 

Weekly Feature Continued

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 InPress’s 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

• Newsreel: News aggregator offering bite-sized news in reel format. Raised $500k.

• Tonic: A privacy-first, swipeable news reader that learns preferences over time. Raised $4.3M.

Event Board

• Bulletpitch Boston Dinner: To kick off the fall, we’re headed to Boston to host a dinner for innovators and investors. Sign up HERE.

• Second Annual Emerging Investor Art Gala, NYC: On September 18th, we’re bring together the next generation of venture capital and growth equity investors. Sign up HERE.

• Bulletpitch San Francisco Dinner: We’re headed to SF to host a dinner for top founders. Sign up HERE.

Note: Spots are limited for dinners. If you apply and aren’t approved for a dinner, we will try to get you to a future event.

Cast Your Vote

Last Week Today

• The Results Are In: Rice, an offline-first wearable AI that captures in person conversations, transforming them into transcriptions, was a dead heat in last week’s poll.

• Subscriber Feedback: “While I love that Rice is approaching wearable AI from a B2B angle, this is a notoriously hard industry to crack.”