• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 25, 2014

Highly touted start-up Circa has hired Internet veteran and ex-Tumblr executive John Maloney to lead day-to-day operations at the mobile news service.
 
As president, he will oversee operations, businesses development and growth, leaving Circa CEO Matt Galligan to focus on development and strategy. Maloney previously served as president of Tumblr from 2008 to 2012, helping to build the blogging site’s user base to 50 million people.
 
Before that, he founded UrbanBaby in 1999 and has invested in more than 25 start-ups since the early 1990s.” I'm going to help Matt and the team scale; I'm thrilled to be a part of Circa,” stated Maloney, who will be based in New York and oversee a staff of 16, divided between New York and San Francisco.
 
The Circa app provides mobile-friendly summaries of breaking news stories, allowing users to “follow” particular stories to receive automated updates. It competes with other apps geared toward on-the-go news like the revamped Yahoo News and The New York Times’ new NYTNow offering focused on top stories.
 
Circa hasn’t released information on active users to date. Its page in the iTunes App Store, where it has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating, says only that the app has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands of times.”
 
The 2-year-old start-up has received $4 million in financing from investors, including Lerer Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Tech-focused publications and sites, including Mashable, The Next Web and Entrepreneur, have named the company among the top start-ups to watch in 2014.
 
With Maloney coming onboard, Circa is likely to be watched even more closely.