Eurekster, known for their Swicki community-driven search platform, has just announced $5.5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Technology Venture Partners of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan.
Eurekster’s most popular product product, Swicki’s, are site specific search engines (we’ve included a swicki in our right sidebar for some time). This has turned into a crowded space over the last year or so - Rollyo, Google Co-Op, and Yahoo! Search Builder all have good products.
Seems like a nice product, and I like any new decent entrants into search in any form.
More inventory, more competition, means more chances to find something much better than AdSense.
Nice…… Awesome to see more people innovating in the search area. It’s sad to just give all the fun to Google and Yahoo!
It would have got much adoption if they had shared the ad revenue from the resulting searches to the publishing web sites
They certainly have made a lot of progress with their affiliate model. It looks like a diversified pool of investors they have.
We run it. We like it. Congrats on the new round! We wrote a piece about it for the Swedish audience!
Congrats to CEO Steve Marder, who’s come a long way from launching at PC Forum 2004. (I met Steve at PC Forum 2006.) Steve, all the best!
They are entering a very crowded space. The best customized search engine product out there now is PSS!, from Septet Systems.
I’ve used the swicki product for about a year now and still have fun training my search results. It’s not so bad seeing the swicki searches regularly show up in my referrer logs either.
It’s nice to see a tech company doing great work outside the SF Bay Area (they have an office in New Zealand)
Congratulations for a second round of venture capital?
I doubt very much this was a case of the founders cashing out their early stakes in the company. More likely, the company probably needed money and offered up new equity in the company (thereby reducing everyone’e stake) in a bid to raise needed cash to fund operations and possible strategic acquisitions.
You know it’s a bubble when people are ready to break out the champagne and congratulate a company for bringing in new vulture, oops - did I say that, venture capitalists. Really, the only time congratulations are in order is for an IPO where they don’t have to substantially lower their offering price or a complete buyout by larger entity.
Cheers,
Doug
Eurekster needs something new, hopefully this capital will give them the means to find it. They have become just the oldest fish in a now crowded pool.