Mr. Nick D'Aloisio

Born in London November 1, 1995, is a British-Australian entrepreneur, computer programmer and designer who created Summly; a program based on a summarization technology he developed with SRI International. He has been recognized as the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology at just 15 years of age. His business partners include Li Ka-Shing, Rupert Murdoch, Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono and Mark Pincus, among others. As of March, 2013 Summly was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars. He has 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. He is still based in London. 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 1000, 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 of 2011. The app caught the attention of Apple who featured Trimit as a new and noteworthy application on the App Store at the same time. The potential of Trimit attracted the attention of Hong Kong based billionaire Li Ka-shing, who provided him with US$300,000 in venture capital funding. He used the feedback and criticism from Trimit to completely re-design the application, and re-launched it in December 2011, as Summly. As of March, 2013, Summly was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million US dollars. Summly aimed to solve perceived problems with the way news articles are presented on smartphones, with the initial version of Summly being downloaded by over 200,000 users. As a result of the corporate support, 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 Hong Kong business mogul Li Ka-shing. Summly's cover page images were created by world-renowned visual artist/photographer Kevin Abosch. At the age of 15 he completed a first round of venture capital funding for Summly from Li Ka-Shing's investment firm, Horizons Ventures; he is the youngest person in the world to raise venture capital. He has been covered by several major publications, including ReadWrite, Business Insider, Wired, Forbes, The Huffington Post and TechCrunch. At the age of 15, he was featured in Gizmodo where he tried to convince editors to feature his app Trimit, which resulted in him crying and humiliating himself. He has also made numerous television appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, ITV, been written about in the British Metro newspaper, and been interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live.] He also appeared on CBS This Morning in an interview with Charlie Rose, CNBC Squawk Box, Bloomberg and appeared on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight in December 2012. Summly has had critical acclaim in receiving Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for "Intuitive Touch" and currently has a 4.5/5 star rating on the App Store. He was named a Top 1000 Influential Londoner by Evening Standard 2012, appeared in the 30 under 30 list for Forbes Magazine, and 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.