News Corporation has injected €4.5m in fresh equity capital into Storyful after the company racked up loses of €4.5m through 2015. The September 2016 funding followed €6.1m in funding that News Corp provided in January 2016.

Rupert Murdoch’s American media giant bought the Irish startup on December 2013 for €18m less than four years after the business commenced trading.

Storyful was established by Mark Little (pictured) in 2010. The initial idea was to aggregate current affairs-related social media content for people to browse. That changed to a new business model based on filtering, verifying and arranging clearance for newsworthy video clips posted on social media sites so that they can be used by news organisations.

Storyful also manages rights for user generated content content on YouTube, MSN, Yahoo and AOL, and curates YouTube video for breaking and daily news.

Accumulated losses at Storful stood at €10.4m in December 2015. The payroll overhead for 54 staff amounted to €2.7m, with average pay across the business of €51,000 per annum. A positive trading sign is that year-end debtors increased to €1.6m from €890,000 the year before.

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Little was in line to gross an estimated €6m from the sale of the business to News Corp, though the payment was subject to earnout terms. He resigned as a director in June 2015 and now works with Twitter.