NewsCord raises £250k to scale media bias tracking tool
NewsCord, a website and app that analyses and exposes bias in how different media outlets report the news, has raised £250,000 in a seed round at a £1.25 million valuation.
Founder Nima Akram announced the round on LinkedIn, saying the funding lets him leave his corporate job and build a team around the company full-time. Akram, a data scientist, started the project three years ago at a HackForGaza hackathon hosted by Deen Developers. The work has been carried out entirely by volunteers to date, according to Tech for Palestine, the pro-Palestine advocacy incubator that has mentored NewsCord and confirmed the round.
NewsCord's core tool takes a news article, generates additional headline variations to widen its search, and pulls in roughly 200 related articles covering the same story. It then uses an AI process to flag differences in tone, missing context, and contradictions between outlets, applying the same analysis across the political spectrum to outlets including the BBC, Sky News, and Al Jazeera. The platform began as a Palestine-Israel-focused tool and has since expanded to cover media bias on other issues.
NewsCord also runs an email complaint tool, launched earlier this year, that helps users identify who to hold accountable for a story and send a complaint in a few clicks. According to Tech for Palestine, the tool generated tens of thousands of emails within two months of launch. The incubator credits the campaigns with prompting a BBC retraction over an anti-Muslim campaign and a correction from Royal Mail, which had described Gaza and Khan Yunis as part of Israel.
Akram said NewsCord's priorities for the next 12 months include sharpening its complaint campaigns, building revenue streams, moving into B2B services for newsrooms, licensing its campaign technology to other organizations that mobilize communities, and producing further quantitative bias reports, following an earlier report on UK media coverage of Gaza.
