Union Square Ventures has invested $650,000 seed money into Zemanta, in what appears to be the first ever investment in a Slovenian tech company by a US VC. That takes Zemanta’s total war chest to $2.2 million raised from USV and the other two investors so far, Eden Ventures and The Accelerator Group in London.
It’s a pretty strong vote of confidence in the London-HQ’d startup created by two 25 year old founders Boštjan Špetič and Andraž Tori who were one of the six winners of the European startup competition Seedcamp last year. Zemanta’s service for bloggers now supports 10 blogging platforms with a plugin which allows bloggers to enhance their content with images, links and non-copyrighted content. Currently you can get the Zemanta service as a free plugin for the following applications and services; Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Live Writer, WordPress, Moveable Type, and Drupal.
I used Zemanta for a short period of time. To be honest, it didn’t blow me away. I found it got in the way more than helped.
I like the idea of this type of plug-in if it could actually reccomend me the right ingredients for my content. Somehow I feel like it wil take these guys a couple more years to break this into the mainstream without any bugs.
I haven’t tried Zemanta yet, I generally shy away from browser extensions/plugins, but I’d be curious to see what applications can be built (or have been already) with their API
I’ve recently started using Zemanta and so far it awesome. I really need them to provide better links from ‘my blogs’ history vs. external links though. Overall, solid product!
I use Zemanta, however their image options is very limited and don’t have a search facility to speed up the matching of content and image process.
Actually I use both Zemanta and OpenCalais – Tagaroo on two different wordpress platforms, of which both plug-ins don’t provide a search facility of images which is a serious pain.
@Muzi: we listened! Just wait until the end of the week and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta