Nick D'Aloisio
King's College London · Summly
He Built an App at 15 and Sold It to Yahoo for $30 Million
9 April 2026
Nick D'Aloisio taught himself to code at age 12 in his bedroom in Wimbledon, London. By 15, he had created Trimit, an app that used algorithms to summarise long articles into digestible snippets — the precursor to Summly.
Li Ka-shing's Investment
Trimit caught the attention of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's venture fund, Horizons Ventures, which invested. D'Aloisio renamed it Summly and rebuilt it with sophisticated natural language processing.
Yahoo Acquisition at 17
In March 2013, Yahoo acquired Summly for a reported $30 million. D'Aloisio was 17 years old, making him one of the youngest tech entrepreneurs to achieve a major acquisition. He briefly became Yahoo's youngest employee.
Continuing to Build
D'Aloisio went on to study philosophy and computer science at King's College London. He later founded Sphere Knowledge, which was acquired by Twitter in 2021. His story shows that age is no barrier to building world-class technology.
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