A 17-year-old London schoolboy has made big news, after he sold his news app company to Yahoo, for an estimated £18m. Nick D'Aloisio hails from Wimbledon in south London, had created the app called Summly – which provides crisp summaries of content from various news sites. The total transaction value is understood to be £18m, assumed to be 90% in cash and 10% in shares at Yahoo. However, some reports suggested the total could go up to as much as £40m.

D'Aloisio, who learnt how to write code for apps when he was 12 years old, developed the Summly app at the age of 15. The application was made for the iPhone, and till the time it was pulled from the Apple App Store after the announcement of the Yahoo deal, had clocked 1 million downloads. The application had content deals with 250 news sources globally, including the Rupert Murdoch owned News Corp., and was managed by a team of 10 employees based in London.

This could be a big acquisition for Yahoo, as it aims to refresh and rebuild its offerings, after having lost relevance significantly, at least in the smartphone ecosystem. D'Aloisio, who is currently on a break from studies for a short period to give complete focus to Summly, will join Yahoo's London office. Meanwhile, he will continue with his education. "Technology has really been the driver behind this whole deal. I can't wait to see how it plays out at Yahoo", he says.