Pulse raises $9 million for news reader

Funded by NEA, Greycroft and Lerer, Pulse pits itself against Flipboard and a host of others

Pulse, a news reader for Android and iOS devices, announced Friday that it has raised $9 million in Series A financing from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Greycroft Partners and Lerer Ventures. The company has now raised $10 million in total.

NEA’s co-head of consumer investing, Patrick Chung, will join Pulse’s board of directors and serving as advisors are Greycroft managing director Alan Patricof and Lerer Ventures manager Ken Lerer (also co-founded the Huffington Post).

A healthy financial reassurance, the new funding arrives in Pulse’s hands three months after the company put a major new version of its mobile news reader in the hands of consumers. Users choose to read content from a bevy of different media sources and can play around with a ton of discovery and browsing features. RSS feeds can also be searched for and the app plays nice with Google Reader.

Pulse has content partnerships with several well-known media organizations, including The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, The Wall Street Journal Digital Network and around 60 others.

Because the app is free, Pulse isn’t really making money at the moment. The company tried charging for the app for a brief period, but thought better of it since the space is so cutthroat.

The explosion of powerful mobile devices and high-quality tablet computers like the iPad has spurred on a heated competition between news readers designed specifically for that form factor. Other major players in the space include Flipboard, Trove and Zite. Despite the rest, Pulse is doing pretty well for itself, having grown to four million users from just 200,000 in November.

Earlier this month, the company launched Pulse.me, where users can archive stories for later reading on the Web or from any iOS or Android device. (Screenshot of Pulse.me at top.)

The new funding will be used to expand Pulse’s engineering team as well as to develop for even more platforms.