Smashing, an AI-powered reading curation app founded by Goodreads' Otis Chandler, is shutting down in April 2025 after failing to scale rapidly enough into a sustainable product. The startup, which had raised $3.4 million, employed seven people who are now affected by the closure. Operating in the competitive consumer tech and news aggregation industry, the small-scale company launched in June 2024 with the goal of using AI and community input to curate content from across the web, but ultimately could not achieve the necessary growth to continue.
