# Otherweb AI for a healthier internet ## Elevator pitch We help people consume better information online, using a customizable client and AI-based filters. - Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/otherweb - Entity ID: wefunder:company:129302 - Last updated: 2026-06-15T05:00:59Z - Generated at: 2026-06-15T21:32:45Z ## Quick facts - We are a Public Benefit Corporation: developing cutting-edge AI to fix the information ecosystem - Disrupting a $565B/year industry - Riding a $15.7 trillion wave of AI innovation (source: PwC report titled "Sizing the prize") ## Active fundraises - wefunder:fundraise:78256: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) - wefunder:fundraise:78257: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) ## Story All the critical problems facing the world right now depend on our ability to fix it.We are all bombarded with superficial, trivial, and often false information, because it generates clicks and views and helps the person who writes it get more ad revenue.The result is that many people have the illusion of knowledge, while in reality, their head is often filled with misinformation, clickbait, and sometimes - just random junk.We’ve developed a suite of AI models that can detect various forms of junk and filter it out. For everything that isn’t obviously junk, we created a nutrition label that lets people decide whether or not this content fits their preferences.And with this new toolkit, we created a new kind of platform that aggregates news, podcasts, research studies and many other sources of information in one place. A place that doesn’t have paywalls, clickbait, autoplaying videos, or any other form of digital junk.To try it out for yourself follow the links at the bottom of the page.You don’t have to use the product to invest, but we highly recommend that you try it out. We want our investors to be our users, and our users to be our investors!Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter and others have turned the web into a Walmart of information - where the trashiest items with the loudest promotion get the best shelf-space. Spam isn't just in our emails - it's in our search engines, our social media feeds, our news websites and our heads. It's everywhere.Users are hungry for a healthy option. They want to be in a place where items are ranked based on quality and not based on clicks and views. We are not creating this desire for long-term health in users - they already have it. Most users want something better.We chose to incorporate as a public benefit corporation, and we are designing our business so that anyone can be a part of it. We want our users to be in control of their feeds, and we want our community to be in control of the algorithms that control the feeds, too.This is why we are courting retail investors like you, instead of venture capitalists.And we will work tirelessly, day and night, to maximize your return on investment while pursuing the broader mission and benefitting society at the same time. ## FAQ 1. **How is this different from Artifact, the app that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger accounced last week?** - Hey Oscar, Artifact is still in private beta so I'm going off of partial info here, but from their public announcements it seems like their primary focus is on personalization. Kevin even referred to their product as "TikTok for text", and made it pretty clear that when they say "AI-based" they are specifically referring to the use of AI to personalize people's feeds in the same way TikTok does. Our focus is quite different - we apply AI primarily to content evaluation and filtering. While pe... 2. **Your pitch talks about the entire internet, but your product seems to be mostly news-centric. How do you plan to expand this from news to other types of content?** - Hey Morgan, great question. The work we are doing - whether it's crawling and aggregating content, evaluating, filtering, sorting, presenting etc - is all universally applicable to all the content on the web. However, the news present a unique "case study" for our approach because people have a better intuitive sense of what a good news story looks like compared to a bad news story. There might be quarrels about left vs right, but there's a generally-accepted definition of where "up" is. Ever... 3. **If your summaries work so well, people have no reason to click through to the original articles, right? Are you worried about copyright claims?** - Hey Dmytro, absolutely, we are always worried about copyright concerns and take "fair use" very seriously. This is why our summaries are abstractive, i.e. they do not include large excerpts from the original work; we don't include images or videos from the original work; we add additional elements (like a nutrition label) that transform the work; and we also link to the original, in a way that credits the author and allows the user to patronize the author's website. We believe that going abov... 4. **How do I check on the value of my investment, and can I cash out?** - Hey Jodie, a SAFE note gets converted to equity in the company when we raise a priced round above a certain threshold. Startups like us tend to raise funds in multiple rounds, where ideally in each round our valuation is higher than in the previous one. So, when we raise the first priced round, you could see a certain return on investment right away - for example, if we raise the round at 18M and your valuation cap was 6M, each share you receive will immediately be worth 3X what you paid for ... 5. **What's the difference between investing as an early bird and investing after?** - Hey Phillipp, thank you for your question! Early birds get a discount in the valuation cap that is listed on their SAFE note. If we translate this into simpler terms using an example - suppose we raise the next round at some valuation that is above the cap, and then we sell the company for $1B dollars next year (hypothetically). An investor who put his money in as an early bird, will have a return on investment of: 1B/6M = 167X An investor who put his money in after the early bird period ende... ## Team - Alex Fink (CEO) - Jurij Smrke, PhD (Chief Data Scientist) - Chris More (Strategic Advisor, Growth) - Rich Evans (Strategic Advisor, News & Media) - Peter Saint-Andre (Strategic Advisor, Partnerships) - Bob Fine (Strategic Advisor, Community Building) - Yaki Tsaig (Strategic Advisor, AI & NLP) ## Q&A - Q: How is this different from Artifact, the app that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger accounced last week? - A: Hey Oscar, Artifact is still in private beta so I'm going off of partial info here, but from their public announcements it seems like their primary focus is on personalization. Kevin even referred to their product as "TikTok for text", and made it pretty clear that when they say "AI-based" they are specifically referring to the use of AI to personalize people's feeds in the same way TikTok does. Our focus is quite different - we apply AI primarily to content evaluation and filtering. While personalization is neat, we don't think the biggest problem facing the world right now is that our news feeds aren't personalized enough. There's a good argument to be made that they're already a bit too personalized (and that each of us lives in a personalized echo-chamber). That said, I think it is actually great that Kevin and Mike are helping us define this new category. I am a big fan of their work and sincerely hope they succeed in this new venture too. Both our products face a similar challenge - by combining elements of social media and news media in the same product, we are delivering more value to users, but we are also going against the division that has existed between these categories until now. So I think we can help each other a lot by defining this new hybrid category together. - Q: If your summaries work so well, people have no reason to click through to the original articles, right? Are you worried about copyright claims? - A: Hey Dmytro, absolutely, we are always worried about copyright concerns and take "fair use" very seriously. This is why our summaries are abstractive, i.e. they do not include large excerpts from the original work; we don't include images or videos from the original work; we add additional elements (like a nutrition label) that transform the work; and we also link to the original, in a way that credits the author and allows the user to patronize the author's website. We believe that going above and beyond is simply the right thing to do in this case, and so our fair use is substantially "fairer" than what Google News or any other aggregator does. In addition, out of respect for the original authors of the work, we consciously avoid any website that places a paywall on their content (again, unlike Google News and most other aggregators). Even though paywalls generally don't restrict crawlers, we still view them as a clear sign that the author does not wish to share his or her work - and we always respect the author's wish. - Q: What is your revenue model? - A: Hey Genevieve, thank you for your question! We want to delay monetization until we have a large-enough number of users to: a) Ensure that we have staying power and won't be "killed" by monetizing too early, as many startups do. b) Study our users' usage of the platform so we can have a clear understanding of the value they derive from it, and roll out monetization gradually in a way that does not have any negative effects on users' reviews or the value they get from the platform. Our initial experiments show that we can add advertising to the search results pages and monetize each user at $58/year this way (each user searches twice a day on average, and each search can result in $0.08 for us eventually) - without charging subscription fees and without adding ads to the news feed or podcast section. However, these are experiments we ran on a small subset of users - we are waiting for the user count to be substantially larger before we start rolling out this kind of monetization to all users. - Q: Your pitch talks about the entire internet, but your product seems to be mostly news-centric. How do you plan to expand this from news to other types of content? - A: Hey Morgan, great question. The work we are doing - whether it's crawling and aggregating content, evaluating, filtering, sorting, presenting etc - is all universally applicable to all the content on the web. However, the news present a unique "case study" for our approach because people have a better intuitive sense of what a good news story looks like compared to a bad news story. There might be quarrels about left vs right, but there's a generally-accepted definition of where "up" is. Every university teaches the same journalistic standards. So the news gives us a great place to start. Once we show that our approach to content selection helps people consume a better news-diet, it becomes easier for us to convince the world that the same approach can be generalized to produce a better information-diet, too. - Q: It seems like you're setting yourself up as an arbiter of content quality. Why would people trust you? - A: Hey Carrie, obviously we have to earn people's trust, and that's never easy. This is why we are doing many things differently compared to other companies in this space. For instance, we registered as a public benefit corporation and listed "information quality" as our primary mission - which gives people confidence that when push comes to shove, we will continue to prioritize information quality, and they can hold us legally accountable for it. We also opened up our models and datasets and made them source-available - which means they can be audited and tested by anyone (to make sure we are doing exactly what we say we do, and don't secretly throttle or shadowban things we don't like). In general, we think that trust needs to be earned, and the best way to earn it is by being honest and transparent with our audience. We've done well in this regard so far. - Q: Do people really care about quality, or is everyone so polarized that it's just about right or left? - A: Hey Jacob, polarization is certainly a confounding factor, but quality still matters. The question is - what percentage of the population cares about information quality today? In our experience, the % of people who REALLY care is probably around 10-20%. They are our natural audience; our early adopters and evangelists. The remaining 80-90% might be driven more by fashion or inertia, but ultimately they can also be reached. It's just a matter of growth, time, and perseverance. - Q: How do I check on the value of my investment, and can I cash out? - A: Hey Jodie, a SAFE note gets converted to equity in the company when we raise a priced round above a certain threshold. Startups like us tend to raise funds in multiple rounds, where ideally in each round our valuation is higher than in the previous one. So, when we raise the first priced round, you could see a certain return on investment right away - for example, if we raise the round at 18M and your valuation cap was 6M, each share you receive will immediately be worth 3X what you paid for it. In each subsequent round, the value of your investment will rise or fall together with our valuation. And each time this happens, you will be notified of the new valuation, and may even be asked to vote on whether you accept the terms of this new round or not. Finally, when we reach an "exit", i.e. an IPO or acquisition, your shares will be converted to publicly-traded shares, or shares in the acquiring company, or cash - depending on the exact type of exit we have. Typically, that is the point at which most investors cash out, but you can also choose to continue to be a shareholder afterwards. - Q: The app seems a bit text-heavy. Why no images? - A: Hi Kali, our initial design followed a style that is similar to Google Reader, and emphasized the ease and speed with which our early adopters (i.e. information-junkies like me) could consume as much information as possible in as little time as possible. We are now working on a redesign that will make the platform more appealing to mainstream users and allow us to cross the chasm - showing one headline at a time, with nice-looking images and swipe gestures to navigate the feed. The new design will be rolled out before the end of February. We will maintain an option for users to revert to the old design (which many of our early adopters will likely use), but I absolutely agree that mainstream users generally prefer more images and less text on the screen. We will support both options soon. - Q: What's the difference between investing as an early bird and investing after? - A: Hey Phillipp, thank you for your question! Early birds get a discount in the valuation cap that is listed on their SAFE note. If we translate this into simpler terms using an example - suppose we raise the next round at some valuation that is above the cap, and then we sell the company for $1B dollars next year (hypothetically). An investor who put his money in as an early bird, will have a return on investment of: 1B/6M = 167X An investor who put his money in after the early bird period ended, will have a return on investment of: 1B/8M = 125X So the return we'll generate for early birds is going to be 33% higher than the return we generate for others who invest in this round. - Q: There are eight newsfeed categories at the moment and it would be great to have the AI fine tune to topics within each category that a user appears to choose more frequently. When do you expect such a feature to be available and will there be a way to see individual sub-categories and adjust them? - A: Hey Denis, excellent question! the short answer is - very very soon. We have already implemented it and we're testing it in a small circle of beta testers (10-12 people) as we speak. If you want to test it out too, ping me separately and I'll add you to our testflight. There's an element of this feature that makes us approach it very cautiously. The kind of customization you see on TikTok and Youtube is blind to semantics - for instance, if you "like" an item about a politician being indicted for corruption, it could be that you like the topic of corruption in politics, or that you dislike this particular politician and you're happy he was indicted. A single "like" button does not differentiate between these scenarios, but we view these scenarios very differently - in one case you are signaling your interest in a topic, and in the other you're signaling your political position. We are trying to customize your feed to the former but not the latter. It's harder to implement and no other media has done it yet, but we think it's the right thing to do. It would allow users to reap the benefits of customized news feeds without creating a political echo-chamber for themselves. Once we roll it out, we'll also allow users to view the implicit customizations we've inferred from their reading patterns and to adjust (or undo) them individually, which is another thing no other media company does today. - Q: Thank you, Alex for meeting with me today to answer my questions about Otherweb!! That was wonderful. ..... This is the "Ask A Question" section, and I only have one more question: How much can I invest in this FANTASTIC COMPANY? Lol! - A: Hey Tom, thank you for the great conversation. It was a pleasure! - Q: How does ChatGPT affect your plans? - A: Hey Tony, we think ChatGPT is a really exciting technology and we're sure it will continue to evolve further. And like all breakthrough technologies, it will introduce quite a bit of flux during the transition period. For instance: Consider what effect ChatGPT will have on the cost of creating low-quality content. It is highly deflationary, right? People will be able to generate "passable" content with less time and effort. Or consider what effect ChatGPT will have on content monetization. Search is a major source of traffic for most websites. If search engines switch from a model of linking to other websites, to a model of summarizing the answers on the SERP directly.. the amount of traffic most websites get will decrease, right? Now, add these two trends together - an increasing amount of junk content, chasing a diminishing amount of monetizable traffic - and it seems like a fair bet that ChatGPT will accelerate the trends we've already been seeing over the past 30 years. The signal-to-noise ratio on the web will continue to become lower at an ever-increasing pace. This makes what we're doing even more critical (and in-demand). - Q: The search feature is pretty cool. Which API do you use? Bing? - A: Hey Bob, I know it's an uncommon answer these days, but.. we made our own search engine. There are two main reasons for this decision: 1. We think that all existing search engines are full of junk results. And there is no easy way to filter these results in real-time - NLP is slow - so to be able to filter them quickly while the user is searching, we had to index them ahead of time for at least the most common queries. 2. We think that the basic UX pattern people use with search is unnatural. We're all used to doing it, but.. there's a better way. If you mention a phrase in a conversation, let's say "UX pattern", and I want to find out more about it - I will ask you "what's that?". I won't pull out my phone and type some key phrases into the address bar of a new browser window, right? That's a weird thing to do. And yet online, we're all doing it. Think about how much better "what's that?" is, compared to typing into the address bar of a new browser window. It doesn't interrupt the flow of the interaction or break context. The person I ask "what's that?" has the full context of what we were just discussing, so there won't be any ambiguity in how to interpret my query. Finally, it requires fewer actions. So, we implemented this exact UX pattern into the Otherweb. If you see any phrase you'd like to know more about, you can highlight it and search the web, or wikipedia, or research studies, etc. It's the equivalent of "what's that?" built into the news reader itself - and to do it well, we needed our own search engine under the hood. - Q: Oh HELL yeah, Alex Fink! I LOVE this. Otherweb is the perfect idea & company, at the perfect time. The Internet IS broken. Otherweb can help fix it. ..... I will be investing next week, and I am extremely excited to be able to do so. Thank you!!! - A: Thanks Tom! We look forward to having you on board. - Q: If there is a different common measure of value besides revenue that commonly translates into real dollar valuation, please share that as well. Users? Thanks. - A: Hey Jeremy, different categories of product tend to use different metrics to track progress and valuation. Consumer apps tend to use monthly active users (MAU) and user-growth as the two primary metrics, because the assumption is that once you have users - you'll find a way to monetize them eventually (via ads, subscriptions, merchandise, etc), and the decision on whether to monetize now or later is a tactical one. Paradoxically, early monetization is often bad for valuation because it slows down user-growth, so if a startup can afford to postpone monetization and focus on just getting more users - it is sometimes (though not always) rewarded in the long run. This is why companies like Google, Facebook and Instagram postponed monetization for as long as they did. We are making the same choice for now. So, let's run through a few public examples: Whatsapp was acquired in 2014 for $20B, when it had about 400 MMAU, i.e. $50/MAU. But that was in 2014 and valuations are higher today. Facebook is valued at $463B with 2.96 BMAU, i.e. $156/MAU. Twitter was acquired for $44B with 256 MMAU, i.e. $172/MAU (that was the peak of the market; today their valuation would be lower). The numbers vary in each case because of differences in growth-rate and in the quality of the audience (e.g. a Linkedin user is obviously worth more than a Snapchat user because he/she has more disposable income, on average). But as a rule, it seems that a non-paying active user is worth somewhere between $100 and $200 right now. We are pricing this round at $80/MAU based on today's user count (and $60/MAU for early birds) to make sure that our early investors have a lot of upside and a vested interest in our success.