17-year-old schoolboy sells his app company to Yahoo for £18m

Summly's founder, Nick D'Aloisio

A 17-year-old London schoolboy has sold his app company to the internet giant Yahoo for an estimated £18m. But he won't be moving to the company's California headquarters just yet because he wants to finish his A-levels.

Nick D'Aloisio, from Wimbledon, south London, created the app, called Summly – which provides bite-sized summaries of content from news and other sites – a little over a year ago from his bedroom and now joins an elite group of teenagers who have become internet millionaires.

D'Aloisio, who is still too young to be a director of his own firm, said he had begun tinkering with apps for mobile devices as a hobby and had not expected to profit from it. The money from the sale of the business will go into a trust fund, although he said he does intend to get a new computer, as well as some new trainers. "I'll be staying in London," said D'Aloisio. "I want to finish my A-levels, and I couldn't really live on my own out there."

His mother, Diana D'Aloisio, appeared to still be somewhat in shock. "I knew he was a little out of the box, but I didn't expect it to happen all of a sudden like this," she said. "From a young age he displayed abilities in technologies I frankly didn't understand. He was doing 3D programming, and we bought him a book called C Programming For Dummies. My husband and I just used our computers for work, he was doing totally different stuff."

The price tag is understood to be £18m, 90% in cash and 10% in Yahoo shares, though other reports suggested the total could be up to £40m. Neither D'Aloisio nor Yahoo would confirm the details of the deal.

D'Aloisio began using computers at the age of nine, making films, and then moved to programming at the age of 12 when Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone. The teenager's success comes less than five years after he released his first app, called Fingermill, an onscreen virtual treadmill for fingers.

Summly, launched in November 2012, won one of Apple's best apps of 2012 awards. The app produces summarised versions of news stories, with the number of words tailored to fit into a single smartphone screen; so far 90m summaries have been read, the company says. But it will not be available much longer – as part of the acquisition, the app will be shut down and integrated into Yahoo's business as it tries to remould itself for the fast-growing mobile market.

D'Aloisio, whose father is a commodities trader and mother a lawyer and director of the company, is taking maths and philosophy A-levels at King's College school, and trying to decide whether the third one should be physics or history. "He still wants to go to Oxford University," his mother said. "He's just a normal kid really. When he's at home, he tidies his room. He's quite neat — very organised, in fact."

After the takeover is finalised, he will work in Yahoo's Soho offices by day, where he will be the company's youngest employee, and continue studying for his A-levels in the evening.

D'Aloisio got the idea for the app in 2011 when revising for his exams and finding himself frustrated with web pages that broadly repeated the same content. He produced an early version of Summly, called Trimit, which was downloaded more than 200,000 times.

The publicity from the Apple award attracted the attention of Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing and his venture capital firm, Horizon Ventures. External investors – others are said to include actors Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher and artist Yoko Ono – bought a third of the company's share capital, according to documents filed at Companies House last October. The rest is owned by D'Aloisio's mother.

It was those investors who brought in a savvy team of directors, engineers, business managers and PR professionals who have been working to turn Summly into a potential world-beater, including older staff such as the chief technology officer, Eugene Ciurana, who boasts 20 years' experience in the technology business, and the head of R&D, Inderjeet Mani. Both of them will be moving to Sunnyvale, close to San Francisco.

Yahoo is one of the oldest names on the web but has struggled to keep pace with more nimble rivals. Chief executive Marissa Mayer is trying to refocus the business around mobile technology. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now more used on smartphones than on the desktop and she has made a string of small acquisitions.

D'Aloisio told the Guardian that it had not been the price that had determined who he would sell to after months of negotiation.

"It was spending time on the campus. Marissa Mayer wants to reinvent the company, and they have a big opportunity. They have a really strong focus on mobile and taking daily habits and reinventing them for a mobile device. I can't wait to work on that level.

The Guardian