Keeping up with the news is overwhelming in an age of information overload. Particle reimagines the experience by organizing articles into comprehensive "Stories," offering clear, concise summaries to quickly grasp what matters. Today, we reached the #1 spot in "Newspapers & Magazine" on the iOS App Store—and I thought I'd share a bit of our backstory.
I've been connected to this team for a long time. About 20 years ago, I shared a house with our CTO and co-founder Marcel Molina. I helped him get started with programming. Since then, Marcel has had an extraordinary career—becoming a senior staff engineer at Twitter, where he helped build foundational features like Retweets, Notifications, and Lists, and later working at Tesla on manufacturing execution systems that scaled across Gigafactories.
At Twitter, Marcel worked closely with our CEO and product visionary Sara Beykpour, who led initiatives like Twitter Blue, Twitter Video, and the experimental app twttr. Sara has a background in Software Engineering and Cognitive Science from the University of Waterloo and spent over a decade at Twitter in engineering and leadership roles.
In late 2022, Sara and Marcel started prototyping a news app that could reduce the cognitive and emotional burden of staying informed—by using AI to help people understand more, faster. They were soon joined by a few other former Twitter colleagues who helped shape the early concept into a working iOS application.
I joined about 15 months ago to contribute across the entire stack. Since then, I've helped design and build major iOS features, rewritten our public website on Cloudflare Workers, and implemented new functionality in our Go backend, which is driven by Google Cloud's Pub/Sub architecture.
What Makes Particle News Different
Particle helps you navigate the news effortlessly—leveraging AI to help you understand more, faster. Some highlights:
• Personalized News – Your feed is tailored to your interests. You can follow specific people, places, and things so you never miss what matters to you.
• Clear Summaries – Get a quick overview or dive deeper with detailed, structured context—summarized in natural language.
• Perspective Tools – Features like "Opposite Sides" and our political spectrum chart let you explore stories through multiple lenses.
• Interactive Q&A – Ask questions about any story and get concise answers with sources and citations.
• Audio Summaries – Use the "Play" feature to listen to your feed, specific stories, or even select articles—great for hands-free or on-the-go moments.
One of the things we're most proud of is how Particle supports publishers. We've partnered with outlets like Reuters, AFP, and Fortune to host some of their content via APIs. These partners get prominent placement, and their links are highlighted in gold to stand out. This model aims to drive traffic back to publishers and reward high-quality journalism, rather than just aggregating and commodifying it.
Transparency is a core value: all sources are cited, generated answers are grounded in evidence, and we take real care to prevent AI hallucinations or misleading summaries.
Despite negligible marketing spend, Particle has grown to the top of its category by focusing on engagement with early users and meaningful partnerships with the media ecosystem.
Coming soon: weekday mini crosswords—a new feature designed by another longtime friend of ours from 20 years back who went on to work at Twitter, lead development on Firewatch, and release his own games independently.
It's incredibly fun and rewarding to be building something meaningful with old and new friends. I feel lucky every day to work alongside some of the best product, design, and engineering minds on a project we hope will help people stay engaged with democracy without burning out.