Romanian startup Deepstash raises €3M to build its knowledge discovery network

Deepstash is a platform that presents information extracted from articles, books or videos as short cards that people can save and organise independently, but also share with others. It is a fresh concept that turns boring education into an engaging and rewarding social experience. 

While apps for note-taking, bookmarking and content discovery have been around for many years, Deepstash is the first app to surface meaningful content in a simple, easy and interactive way. Deepstash believes ideas are everywhere - be it in articles, videos, or podcasts - so have integrated content from multiple outlets into an idea-based curated format.

Deepstash is now used by more than one million people in more than 150 countries to improve their lives every day, and is available on the App Store, Google Play and on the Web. Deepstash has already curated 60k ideas in the app from some of the most trusted sources on the planet, and users have saved a total of 12 million ideas to date.

Deepstash was co-founded by current CEO Vladimir Oane, who had always struggled with turning his reading into actionable insights. Being an avid note-taker, he started to collect, organise and share all the ideas in separated chunks of information. The opportunity to turn his passion into a product came in 2019. After uberVU, a social analytics platform he co-founded and sold to Hootsuite in 2014, he looked for his next opportunity. After becoming disillusioned with the state of social, he decided to take matters into his own hands and teamed up with Dan Ciotu, his old co-founder and Cristian Mezei, a fellow entrepreneur to create a platform where people could connect around meaningful information. 

People across the world are online more than ever before because of the pandemic, whether working from home, attending school from home, catching up with friends via video calls or shopping for food. Deepstash offers a positive and useful platform for users who are struggling with the negative consequences of spending more time on social media and consuming content focused on the pandemic or that's political and stressful.

The funding will be used to make a number of strategic hires in Deepstash’s engineering, growth and marketing departments, growing headcount from 16 to 20 over the next few months. This will support product development and the next iteration of the Deepstash platform which will turn the experience into a social one, allowing users to follow each other and leveraging the real power of ideas by connecting like-minded people. 

The funding will also be used to support content distribution for creators and streamline the overall creation process, utilising machine learning to generate ideas.

Vladimir Oane, CEO and co-founder of Deepstash said: "We are an antidote to current social networks that sometimes revolve around negativity. We have a preference for evergreen content that focuses on a bite-sized format in a world of information abundance. In 2020, attention is our most valuable currency, and we’re betting on our collective desires to spend it more wisely. 

“It’s no surprise that Deepstash started gaining traction as the world’s content consumption shifted towards mobile. We stopped flipping pages and we started scrolling; to put it simply, social media has made us lose focus on what matters. Everything has become shorter & faster, but we believe that users still deserve access to quality content and intelligent, socially-powered curation is the answer in an age where we are hit with so much information on a daily-basis.”

Sitar Teli, General Partner at Connect Ventures added: “Connect Ventures has always been a product focused firm, and our investment in Deepstash is a testament to this. Vlad and his team's vision of helping consumers discover, retain and share meaningful content is one that resonates with our own love of finding great content to read and learn from and our belief in the immense product and business potential in helping millions of consumers do so."