This is sad to hear. Circa has a brilliant team with an incredibly well designed product.

[The CEO] feels Circa struggled to find new investors because of the company’s focus on mobile (thus not generating millions of web pageviews) and working to retain current users via product enhancement at the expense of acquiring new users.

I think there's a good lesson here about raising venture capital. As soon as you take that money, you can no longer go about building your company however you want. It becomes about growth. You're expected to win the space, or go down trying.

Such a big supporter of the product; with the exception of random articles found through Twitter, etc., I've used Circa and the BBC world podcast almost exclusively for news over the past year.

Might just be me but I'd likely pay subscription for their service.