Zette

If you recognize this screen, you’re one of a billion people who hit paywalls every day.

Paywalls have a 99.7% bounce rate, leading to a global epidemic of clickbait, misinformation, and fake news.

Now imagine surfing the internet paywall-free.

Zette magically drops paywalls from articles with just one click.

Our revolutionary pay-per-article model lets you legally unlock paywalled news, giving you access to over 100 publishers with a single subscription.

Our world-class team comes from Harvard, MIT and the Quebec AI Institute.

We're experts across media (Forbes, Digital Trends), tech (Twitter, Entelo), startups (Classhook, Below the Fold) and AI research (ServiceNow, MILA).

Together we're well-equipped to build the future of online content consumption.

Our underlying competitive advantage is our extensive network of publishers.

We’ve secured 110 publishers, ranging from Forbes to New Scientist to Pulitzer-Prize-winning local news outlets like the Miami Herald.

We're one of the only companies in the world to close this caliber of deals with publishers—giving us a massive competitive advantage.

Each unlocked article saves readers money, pays accredited journalists, and generates revenue for us.

Similar to Netflix or Spotify, we share revenue with our media partners through licensing agreements, with expected future margins averaging 50%.

Pricing starts at $9.99 per month for 30 articles, and scales up from there. For every article unlocked, a portion goes back to newsrooms—so that every time you read, a journalist gets paid.

We're first movers in an untapped market, and we're growing—fast.

50,000+ readers have already signed up.

If our 5x growth rate from 2023 continues into the future, then we’re on track to grow our readership to a quarter million by the end of 2024 and 1 million by the end of 2025.

Unlike news tech 1.0 companies, we're ushering in a new era of innovation.

No existing model of content consumption perfectly captures what we do, and innovation in this industry has been stagnant for a long time.

Almost all of our competitors were founded in the 2010's, and none of them directly address the consumer paywall pain point we're tackling with Zette.

We've raised from top venture capital firms and refined our model through multiple accelerators.

We've also received coverage and accolades from across the internet.

The future of news consumption is intelligent, fact-checked, and personalized. We're building that future with Zette AI.

We were just accepted into the 2024 cohort of AI startups at the MILA Institute, the world's largest academic research institution for deep learning.

Thanks to resources and support from MILA, we're currently in the R&D phase of our core AI innovation, centering around a four-part algorithm that can recommend, summarize, interact with, and contextualize the news.

Our 1st acquisition is already paving the way.

In December 2023 we acquired Below the Fold from parent company Acciyo—a startup founded out of MIT that uses AI to bridge the widening gap between reading the news and understanding it.

Acciyo scans thousands of news sites, employs machine learning and natural language processing to identify key topics, entities, and metadata, and generates an AI-powered timeline that provides helpful context behind news stories.

We aim to integrate Acciyo's core technology into Zette AI, which would be a major step in simplifying and contextualizing the news reader’s experience.

For us, journalism is just the beginning.

At Zette, our mission is to democratize access to information across the internet. We plan to scale our pay-per-view model beyond journalism, expanding across digital content including e-books, academic journals, podcasts, shows and more.

Our go-to-market strategy is to service consumers, businesses, and universities, making knowledge accessible to everyone. Ultimately we are targeting a venture-scale outcome (100x return) in the next 10 years with the end goal of an IPO.

If you share our vision of a future where information can be accessible to everyone, and our belief that we'll be the ones to do it—then we invite you to join the Zette revolution on Wefunder today.

FAQ

How does investing work?

• (1) Join Wefunder. Click ‘Sign Up’ in the top right corner using your email address.
• (2) Choose an amount you’re comfortable investing. You can commit any amount you’d like, starting from $250 up to your legal max.
• (3) Confirm investment amount. When the campaign ends, the funds will be deposited to Zette. If we exceed our maximum allotment of $1.235m, we’ll have to refund some investments (more on refunds below).

What happens if the $1.235m maximum allotment is exceeded?

• We can’t exceed $1.235m. If we become oversubscribed, we may need to refund you some or all of your investment amount. We will aim to give a $1,000 USD allocation or more to active Zette customers, but if we have too much interest in the round, then we may need to reduce the allocation.

What is the minimum investment?

• The minimum check size is $250 USD.

What's the maximum I am legally allowed to invest?

• Through Regulation Crowdfunding everyone can invest up to $2,500. How much you're able to invest above that depends on your net income and net worth. You can see how much you're allowed to invest by adding those two numbers under "Investor Limits" here: https://wefunder.com/settings

Do I need to be an accredited investor?

• No. Wefunder allows you to invest without being an accredited investor. All you have to do is sign up and invest.

Do I have to do anything for Zette as an investor?

• No. All you do is invest. 

When will my investment leave my account?

• If you fund your Wefunder Cash account, your funds will move from your account immediately, similar to online shopping. You'll also be able to pay via bank account, wire transfer, credit card, or check.
• Once you confirm your investment, the funds you invest are permanently deposited into Zette via Wefunder once our campaign closes. This is irreversible and confirmed investments cannot be refunded.

For other questions, please check out Wefunder's FAQs or contact [email protected].