About NewsBreak

Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.

Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.

Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).

Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.

Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI

About the role

NDot AI is building a U.S.-China mini-drama ecosystem. It runs on NewsBreak's U.S. audience, distribution, recommendation and growth capabilities. We're hiring our founding U.S. GTM & Partnerships Lead to build the U.S. side from the ground up.

You'll work alongside a China-based GTM counterpart. Together you'll bring short-drama producers, app developers, directors and creative talent to NewsBreak, NDot and Nova. You'll sign and activate high-quality content partners. You'll also close distribution, app-growth and monetization partnerships.

A big part of the job is connecting U.S. directors and culturally fluent creatives with Chinese production and AI-studio capacity. The goal is content that resonates with U.S. audiences and can be produced at scale.

This is a hands-on 0→1 ecosystem-building role, not a traditional enterprise sales job. You'll work closely with senior leadership, product, engineering and ad sales. What you learn from partners will feed directly into NDot's product and GTM priorities.

What you'll do

Map and build the U.S. ecosystem. Build a prioritized map and pipeline of producers, app developers, directors and talent, production partners and strategic ecosystem players. Coordinate it with the China GTM lead.
Sign and activate producers. Recruit high-quality mini-drama producers and content partners, with priority on content suited to U.S. audiences. Get them publishing consistently.
Launch the founding-partner program. Design and run producer incentives, including preferential revenue share, promotional traffic, Nova ad credits and referral rewards.
Close app and monetization partnerships. Turn your strongest app-developer relationships into NDot customers. Partner with the Nova ad sales team to introduce short-drama advertisers from the ecosystem.
Make cross-border matches. Connect U.S. creative talent with Chinese production partners. Create partnerships and content that show NDot adds value beyond distribution.
Build the GTM engine. Own the U.S. motion: partner segmentation, pitch, outreach, industry events, community building, PR and sales materials, CRM and forecasting.
Shape the product. Turn producer needs, market insights and content performance into input for product, growth and localization.

What we're looking for

Must-haves

Deep experience and an established network in the mini-drama / short-drama industry
Senior experience in GTM, BD, partnerships, producer relations or content acquisition
Track record in U.S.-China cross-border business
Fluent English and Mandarin Chinese, with the cultural fluency to work credibly in both markets
Proven skill at sourcing, negotiating and closing partnerships, and at activating producers after signing
Experience building ecosystems or communities, including industry events, market mapping and pipeline/CRM discipline
Strong connector instincts, commercial judgment, persistence and bias for action; comfortable with ambiguity in a startup setting

Nice-to-haves

Content acquisition or distribution; app growth or user acquisition
Creator or talent partnerships; a film/TV production or talent network in LA or NY
A network of Chinese production houses or AI studios; experience with AI-content production
Consumer app or short-video platform experience
Strong product and creative instincts; able to bridge creative, commercial and technical teams

The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

Annual Base Pay Range

$175,000—$205,000 USD

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Annual Base Pay Range 175000 - 205000 USD

About the company

NewsBreak runs a free app and website that gather local and national news for readers across the United States and sort it by ZIP code and by each reader's interests. In 2022, it launched a national network of independent local writers to cover communities that get little attention from traditional media. Its software pulls articles from local outlets, national publishers, and its own contributors into a single feed, and the app sends nearby alerts about crime, weather, and traffic. NewsBreak makes money by selling ads, including to local businesses, and shares ad revenue with partner publishers. It was founded in 2015 and is based in Mountain View, California.

Company Size

201-500

Company Stage

Series C

Total Funding

$139.8M

Headquarters

Mountain View, California

Founded

2015

Get referred to NewsBreak

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

Work reaches a national audience: NewsBreak serves 40 million monthly US users and runs 100,000 ad campaigns a month.
New businesses create room to grow: 11 of NewsBreak's 58 openings in October 2026 staff new AI and video ventures.
Its article linking won on appeal: an August 2026 ruling cleared it of copyright display claims, though one claim continues.

What critics are saying

Neighborhood app Nextdoor competes for local readers: it carried news from over 4,000 local publishers by February 2026.
Stock options lack a recent price: NewsBreak's last announced funding was a $115 million round in January 2021.
Expect office-based work: only 2 of NewsBreak's 58 open jobs in October 2026 allow remote work.

What makes NewsBreak unique

Email is a second front door: about 30 million people get NewsBreak's personalized newsletters, with 50 million sent daily.
It opens its tech to publishers: Weather.com cut ad review work 80% using ClearStream, NewsBreak's AI screener, by December 2025.
Its playbook comes from China: its CEO modeled NewsBreak on Yidian Zixun, the Beijing news app he started after Yahoo.

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Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match
Paid Vacation
Paid Sick Leave
Paid Holidays
Paid Parental Leave
Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account
Commuter Benefits
Team Activity Budget

Company News

PR Newswire

Sep 15th, 2026

NewsBreak appoints Nicolas Zylberstein as chief business officer to lead AI expansion

NewsBreak has appointed Nicolas Zylberstein as its first Chief Business Officer. He will lead growth across NewsBreak's flagship local news platform and two new AI ventures: Nearby AI and NDot AI. Nearby AI is an agentic local intent marketplace connecting consumers with local businesses. NDot AI is a B2B media tech platform helping publishers grow and monetise audiences. Both platforms leverage NewsBreak's decade of experience serving over 40 million monthly active users. Zylberstein joins from ByteDance, where he spent six years driving AI partnerships and working on TikTok Shop's early launch. He previously held senior roles at Pinterest, YouTube, and The Walt Disney Company, contributing to Pinterest's IPO and the launches of YouTube Premium and Disney+.

PR Newswire

May 6th, 2026

NewsBreak launches Spotlights to connect small businesses with 40M local readers

NewsBreak, America's leading local news app, has launched SPOTLIGHTS, a programme helping small businesses reach local customers through storytelling. Business owners answer questions to create articles, which are then published on NewsBreak and distributed to the platform's 40 million monthly active users via hyperlocal targeting and push notifications. Early results from 750 participating businesses show strong engagement, generating 76 million impressions, 1.52 million views and over 19,000 shares. One participant, Hello Uncle pop-up restaurant, gained over 200 Instagram followers and sold out events following their article. The programme, available at localbusiness.newsbreak.com, includes one feature article and push notification free of charge. Founded in 2015, Mountain View-based NewsBreak reached unicorn status in 2021.

VentureBeat

May 22nd, 2025

Time Magazine Appears To Accidentally Publish Embargoed Story Confirming New Anthropic Model

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. The San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic had already informed the general public that it planned to make an announcement today, Thursday, May 22nd with a livestream scheduled for 9:30 am PT.Many in the wider AI power user community, especially on X, began to theorize that the announcement would mark the launch of a new Claude model codenamed “Neptune,” based on earlier inspection of Anthropic documents and code online, which some took to be a new version of its powerful Claude large language model (LLM) family, potentially the long-awaited “Claude 4 Opus,” a larger-parameter (denoting more internal settings and complexity) model successor to the current Claude 3.7 Sonnet.Now, it appears that Time Magazine has accidentally confirmed that rumor, publishing and quickly removing an article on its website, according to the observations of eagle-eyed AI programmers and news bloggers on X.Someone also appears to have published a full scrape of the Time article online on the news aggregator app Newsbreak, though that too has now been taken offline. The focus of Time’s piece is on Claude 4 Opus’s safety risks and mitigations, but it does reveal that the new Claude is smart enough to potentially help novices create new bioweapons.There are scant specifics about the model size, cost, licensing terms, and performance on commonly used third-party AI benchmarks. For those, we will just have to wait until more information is revealed by Anthropic — or leaked by members of the press and AI community. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily

Securities.io

Mar 4th, 2025

Decentralized Networks Primed To Advance Autonomous Vehicles

Decentralized intelligence networks could hold the key to making self-driving cars smarter and safer. Many see these vehicles as the future of travel. However, there are still several problems that manufacturers and regulators need to work out.At their core, self-driving vehicles rely on sensors and other data to stay on course, avoid obstacles, and safely deliver passengers to their destinations. These sensors can include LiDAR, radar, thermal imaging, and other advanced systems. All of these systems create a data footprint that can be used to improve the car's performance in the future.Federated LearningOne way that manufacturers have found to improve their vehicles' self-driving performance is to enable their cars to share this data using a system called federated learning. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach where individual vehicles train models locally and share only model updates with a central server

PYMNTS

Feb 26th, 2024

Report: Paytm Turning To Banks To Process Upi Transactions

Embattled Indian FinTech Paytm is reportedly turning to a group of banks for help. The company is likely to work with Aix Bank, HDFC, Yes Bank and the State Bank of India to process transactions though India’s popular unified payments interface (UPI), Reuters reported Monday (Feb. 26), citing two sources familiar with the matter. The news comes as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank and banking regulator, has asked Paytm’s banking operations — Paytm Payments Bank — to shutter its business

NewsBreak

Founding GTM & Partnerships Lead - Mini-Dramas

About the job