Ground

Ground News is a news aggregation platform operated by Snapwise Inc., a privately held Canadian corporation registered in Ontario and based in Kitchener-Waterloo. The service groups articles from many outlets covering the same event into a single story and labels each contributing source with a political bias rating, a factuality rating and ownership information, so readers can compare how coverage differs across the spectrum. The company states it processes nearly 60,000 articles a day from more than 50,000 news sources, and that it has hand-coded ownership data for 2,276 news outlets and counting.

Bias and factuality scores are not produced in-house: bias is averaged from the ratings of three independent monitoring organizations — AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check — while factuality draws on Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check. Where only one or two organizations have rated an outlet, the available ratings are used. A recurring "Blindspot" feature surfaces stories that received disproportionate coverage from one side of the political spectrum, and natural language processing is used to cluster related articles even when outlets use different vocabulary. Products include a website, iOS/Android apps, a browser extension for checking bias on articles encountered elsewhere (including links shared on social platforms), newsletters, and a Ground Education offering.

The company describes itself as independently controlled and operated by its founders and team and supported by subscribers, alongside outside investors. Wikipedia notes that Snapwise Inc.'s board includes Manuel Mattke, an employee of Joe Ricketts.

Founding story

Ground News was founded by siblings Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh out of the University of Waterloo's Velocity incubator; the company site dates the founding to 2017 and Wikipedia dates the launch of the service to April 27, 2018. Kaur holds a degree in aerospace engineering and began her career at NASA working on the New Horizons spacecraft, then joined a Berlin startup building earth-observation satellites before being recruited to Rolls-Royce, where she became the youngest and first female vice president in its jet engine customer business division. Singh is a University of Waterloo Nanotechnology Engineering graduate (BASc 2012) who launched a first startup at 19 through the university's E-co-op program and worked in sales at Procter & Gamble, R&D at Danaher and three years as a management consultant at Bain & Company. Kaur serves as CEO and Singh as CTO. One source reports the pair had earlier co-founded an app called uCIC that let users share real-time photos and video from around the world.

Business model

Ground News operates a freemium consumer subscription service. Users can read as a guest or with a free account, while deeper analysis features sit behind paid tiers. One source lists three tiers — Pro at $9.99/year, Premium at $39.99/year and Vantage at $99.99/year — with Vantage adding ownership breakdowns, personal bias analysis of reading habits, factuality scoring of a user's top sources and consumption analytics; group subscriptions for organizations of up to 50 people are offered at discounts of up to 50%. The same source states the company does not sell advertising or user data. Subscriptions are also sold through app-store in-app purchases.

Subscription revenue from individual and group plans across free, Pro, Premium and Vantage tiers, billed annually or via monthly app-store subscriptions rather than advertising.

Traction

The Android app reports more than 1 million downloads and a 4.8 rating from approximately 32,600 reviews, and is listed as #9 top grossing in News & Magazines. The company site states nearly 60,000 articles from over 50,000 sources are processed daily and that ownership data has been coded for 2,276 outlets. A 2024 study by political scientist Curtis Bram examined the Blindspot report and concluded the non-confrontational, information-sharing approach may be a promising method to mitigate polarization.

Latest developments

The Android app was last updated September 10, 2026 with bug fixes and UI, infrastructure and performance enhancements. In 2025, Axios reported data indicating Ground News was the most common sponsor on YouTube by number of creator integrations and total views within the sampled set.