Nick D'Aloisio

Designer of Summly — a program aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones — D'Aloisio is a British-Australian entrepreneur, computer programmer, and designer who created the app based on summarization technology he developed with SRI International. He is recognized as the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology, at just 15 years of age. His business partners have included Li Ka-Shing, Rupert Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, and Mark Pincus, among others.

D'Aloisio lived in Melbourne and Perth and grew up in London, United Kingdom, attending King's College School in Wimbledon, where he received an academic scholarship. His mother, Diana D'Aloisio, is a lawyer, and his father, Lou Montilla, is a Vice President at Morgan Stanley. He received his first computer, a MacBook, at age 9 and used it to create movies with editing tools such as Final Cut Pro. He began writing apps at the age of 12 in 2008.

He created the Trimit application for iOS in March 2011, which used an analytical tool to condense text content into 1,000-, 500-, or 140-character summary text. Technology weblog Gizmodo covered the app and declared it to be the worst app of the week in July 2011, while at the same time Apple featured Trimit as a new and noteworthy application on the App Store. The potential of Trimit attracted the attention of Hong Kong-based billionaire Li Ka-Shing, who provided D'Aloisio with US$300,000 in venture capital funding. At the age of 15, he also completed a first round of venture capital funding for Summly from Li Ka-Shing's investment firm, Horizons Ventures, making him the youngest person in the world to raise venture capital.

D'Aloisio used the feedback and criticism from Trimit to completely redesign the application, relaunching it in December 2011 as Summly. Summly aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones, with the initial version being downloaded by over 200,000 users. Summly's cover page images were created by world-renowned visual artist and photographer Kevin Abosch. In November 2012, he received US$1,000,000 in new venture funding for Summly from several international celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Ashton Kutcher, and Stephen Fry, in addition to Li Ka-Shing. In March 2013, Summly was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars.

Summly received critical acclaim, earning Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for "Intuitive Touch" and a 4.5/5 star rating on the App Store. D'Aloisio has been named a Top 1000 Influential Londoner by the Evening Standard in 2012, appeared in the 30 Under 30 list for Forbes Magazine, and was featured in the Mail on Sunday Top 100 Things to Watch in 2013. He also won a Spirit of London Award in December 2012 as Entrepreneur of the Year.

He has been covered by several major publications, including ReadWrite, Business Insider, Wired, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and TechCrunch. D'Aloisio has made numerous television appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, and ITV, was written about in the British Metro newspaper, and was interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live. He also appeared on CBS This Morning in an interview with Charlie Rose, on CNBC Squawk Box, and on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight in December 2012.