Pulse News originally launched with much fanfare as a for-charge application to reinvent news reading on the iPad. The application was then later released for iPhone and Android.
In an interview with Mashable, Alphonso Labs co-founder Akshay Kothari shares that the decision to go free was representative of the startup's maturation process. The project was concocted by Kothari and Ankit Gupta for a course at Stanford. Six weeks later, Pulse was released and quickly became the best-selling app in the App Store.
Kothari also discloses that the duo was motivated to make the application free to up the user count exponentially. Kothari and Gupta believe their product is now stable enough to handle a much larger user base and design to release features that surface trending articles for users in aggregate. "We want to uncover interesting things that are going on around the world," Korthari explains.
As part of the announcement, Alphonso Labs is going on record for the first time to reveal that it previously raised $800,000 in seed funding from BV Capital, Greycroft Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Redpoint Ventures.