Newsle, the news discovery engine for the world's most connected professionals, today announced that the company has raised $1.65 million in a Series A round of venture financing. The round was led by Advance Publications Inc., along with participation from Maveron, DFJ, Transmedia Capital and Launny Steffens, and previous investor Rockwell Schnabel. The company also announced that Whitney Shaw, president of American City Business Journals, has joined the board of directors.

As online news proliferates, professionals are struggling to stay informed without becoming overwhelmed. Today's professionals have hundreds or thousands of social connections whose activities are relevant to their business. Newsle is the leading online provider that keeps them up-to-date on relevant news from across their networks. As part of this investment, Newsle plans to aggressively grow its development team and expand product offerings.

"The Internet has transformed news, and effective businesspeople need tools to cope with this transformation," said Jonah Varon, co-founder of Newsle. "We help people find essential items they might otherwise miss in the flood of online news. This round of investment allows us to grow our team and further establish Newsle as the go-to resource for relevant news discovery."

In order to deliver each professional the most relevant news about their network, Newsle continuously combs the web, analyzing over one million articles a day from over 100,000 news sources in real-time. Newsle then extracts the news that is most relevant for each user and delivers this in a daily email or news dashboard. Newsle is more sophisticated and actionable than traditional news alert services or news readers, and more reliable than social media as a channel for news discovery.

"Newsle has built a fantastic product that every professional should be using," said Whitney Shaw, president of American City Business Journals. "We're big believers in the vision of organizing news around people. Advance Publications and American City Business Journals are proud to lead this investment."

Newsle's board of directors now includes: Jonah Varon, co-founder of Newsle, Axel Hansen, co-founder of Newsle, Whitney Shaw, president of American City Business Journals, and Ken Lerer, founder of Lerer Ventures and co-founder of Huffington Post.

Newsle launched into private beta in January 2011. Newsle is available today in open beta. To sign up and create an account, visit: http://newsle.com.

About Newsle

Newsle is the news discovery engine for the world's most connected professionals.

Newsle was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco, California. The company is venture backed by Advance Publications, Maveron, DFJ, Transmedia Capital, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Launny Steffens, and Rockwell & Evan Schnabel.

More information about Newsle can be found at http://newsle.com.