MATTER

Ben Springwater and Robert Mackenzie met at Nextdoor, the neighborhood social app. Springwater ran the Marketplace and Growth teams there.

In 2019 they both left to fix something that annoyed them. Saving an article to read later was easy.

Actually reading it was not. The apps that owned that space, Instapaper and Pocket, had barely changed in a decade.

So the two of them went through Y Combinator and started rebuilding the read-later app from scratch.

Matter is a subscription app. You save articles, newsletters, and threads to it from anywhere on the web.

It strips out the ads and clutter and hands you a clean page to read. It costs about $60 a year.

That is the whole business. No ads.

No selling your reading data. You pay, you read.

The pitch is simple. Reading online is broken and worth five bucks a month to fix.

The core Matter app saves and cleans up anything you want to read. The standout feature is text-to-speech.

Matter reads articles aloud in voices that actually sound human, so your reading list becomes a listening list. It also transcribes podcasts, pulls in your newsletters automatically, and lets you highlight and save the best lines.

Everything syncs across your phone and your desktop.

Matter never chased millions of users. It went after the people who read the most and care the most.

Newsletter obsessives. Knowledge workers.

The kind of person with 400 tabs open. The audio feature became the hook.

Matter turns any article into a podcast using natural voices, so you can listen on a walk instead of squinting at your phone. In 2023 it added podcast transcription, which lets you highlight spoken words like text.

Word of mouth in reading and productivity circles did the rest.

The read-later graveyard is crowded. Readability shut down.

Instapaper changed hands twice. Pocket, the biggest name of all, got bought and left to rot.

Matter is trying to make money in a category where almost nobody has. The honest problem is that most people will not pay for a reading app.

Matter has tens of thousands of active users and thousands of paying ones. That is a real business.

It is just not a huge one yet.

Matter raised a $2 million seed round from a stacked list of angels. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison put in money.

So did former Stripe product lead Lachy Groom and Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz. Then in 2021 Google Ventures led a $7 million Series A.

That GV check is the real signal here. When Google's venture arm backs a reading app, someone has decided the quiet category is worth owning.