Former investment banker Yusuke Umeda, whose Uzabase company last month completed the $75m-110m purchase of business news site Quartz, from the former owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, is seeking other acquisitions to help his NewsPicks app become global. While it has some tough competitors including Bloomberg and Axel Springer’s newly-profitable Business Insider, its US partnership with News Corp’s Wall Street Journal points to a strategy of alliances to expand its subscription service. Its ambition is to have 1m paid subscribers globally by 2023, compared with the 72k subscribers who currently pay $15 per month in Japan. In the US, where NewsPicks has been available for eight months, it has 175k users and hopes to convert these to paying some $15 per month. While Uzabase may still be working out how best to collaborate with Quartz, it is already said to be looking for its next deal, in Europe. Could be a good collaboration for the UK’s Daily Telegraph which has strong financial content.
Uzabase goes global
