Kosmix, a universal search engine that pulls data from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, Yahoo Buzz and our own CrunchBase, has closed a $20 million round led by Time Warner, with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Dag Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round brings Kosmix’s total funding to $55 million. As part of today’s announcement Kosmix revealed that Ed Zander, former Motorola Chairman and CEO, will be joining as a private investor and advisor (other private investors include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Legg Mason’s Bill Miller).
For more information on the service, check out our preview here and the blog of founder Anand Rajaraman here.
what will be at the end of the game?
Get enough users, launch an ad platform and make money doing nothing (become an electronic middle man between B and C). That’s how Google did it and I don’t see many other ways of generating meaningful revenue from search. They sure have a lot of partners though!
Jon
http://blog.legendarylife.com
Who says the recession is affecting VC funding. 20MM for Kosmix?! Its a great idea but will it ever make money? They must have had to bend over hard for this round.
Excuse me for my ignorance, but how is it a “great idea”? There are countless aggregators online just like Kosmix.
From the blog: “Instead of serving results from an index, Kosmix builds topic pages by querying these applications…”
So they don’t serving results from an “index”, yet they “query” applications? Uh, does this make sense to anyone else?
So it seems that investors are going for the only hot CPM left, search traffic.
waste of money
May be they should just use the Yahoo! BOSS APIs for powering their search and mash it up with the other content.
Will save them a ton of money and effort
-Rajesh
This company is going nowhere by adding more money like adding salt to the sea. They have no content and all they are doing is create links that go out of their sites. Their only model is google adsense which is showing a 25% decline already. I wish they spend the time to get good content rather than linking to other sick companies funded by other VCs and have no clue how to make money!!
20MM… Jesus Wept.
So they have no IP of their own to speak of and are just hitting a bunch of APIs to form search results… aren’t there a TON of websites that already do this? What’s the value proposition?
@yongfook – what leads you to say Kosmix has no IP of their own? Sounds like you are not too familiar with the history of the company.
nope, I’m not that familiar.
well if they are doing something special, it’s not immediately obvious. when I do a search all I see are search results organised by source (photos from yahoo, search results from google…etc) and this isn’t mind-blowing innovation. Technorati implemented something like this a couple of years ago to jazz up their boring-looking blog search pages.
anyway if I’m mistaken and there is some monolithic, all-knowing algorithm behind this, then consider me pwned.
money well spent. lets see if they can put it to use to solve the content aggregation issues that we are all facing. i know there is a great pain in the market to find organized and topical pages on specific subject.
what if someone could take the best of google, wikipedia, youtube, flickr and shopping and put it all on the same page?
they could become the one ultimate destination site for everybody searching for anything and earn up to 2 cents per US PV/search
…. at least thats what the kool aid is saying.
causemix, kozmix, cosmix, cosmicks. i say they should merge with cuil, cool, cuill. they seem like they would make a good couple. i think the days of garbled vanity domains is over. look what happened to the king of garbled domain yahoo.
LanguageLocator.com – grammatically correct
You must be the William Hung of the Internet.
Now,waste money
i reviewed the site back when it came out in may. i told you fellas it looked promising look at the examples in the founder’s blog and see for urself:
http://www.kosm...c/san_francisco
**********Welcome to——www.Mixedloving.com——the first,
largest and most-trusted interracial dating site in the world.
This is the best place for looking for interracial dating
relationship or marriage. We bring together interracial-dating
minded singles from all races, ethnicities and cultures,
whether they are in your own neighborhood or around the
world.
Kosmix builds topic pages. Sounds like a similar concept to Mahalo.
True, Mahalo and kosmix both build topic pages but mahalo is way better. I tried many queries on kosmix, not impressed. they have tried to copy mahalo and done a poor job of copying http://www.kosm...ojevich_bribery
– K
What’s the mahalo equivalent so we can compare?
this not topic page, it is clutter page my friends
http://www.kosm.../Pearl%20Harbor
Gimmix?
Kozmik disaster?
Raisingmoney isnot success. Cashing out is success.
Funding announcements are so 1999.
FAIL
I don’t think Kosmix.com is their flagship property anymore. They seem to have more traction with righthealth.com and rightautos.com — vertical search plays in lucrative advertising verticals.
Kudos to the management team for closing a big round in a down market.
Kudos to Kosmix for landing funding, and for its efforts to put a new face
on search.
$20M is nothing to scoff at, particularly in today¹s turbulent economy.
But you should check out another search fledgling – NeXplore
Search (www.NeXplore.com)
NeXplore is fighting the same good fight to change the face of search, but
is faring significantly better than Kosmix, Cuil, Viewzi, Mahalo, Searchme,
Cooliris, etc.
NeXplore traffic has been steadily climbing and is now in the neighborhood
of 4MM unique visitors/month.
Don¹t take my word for it, check out
NeXplore vs the others on Compete.com.
Kudos to Kosmix for landing funding, and for its efforts to put a new face on search.
$20M is nothing to scoff at, particularly in today¹s turbulent economy.
But you should check out another search fledgling – NeXplore (www.NeXplore.com)
NeXplore is fighting the same good fight to change the face of search, but is faring significantly better than Kosmix, Cuil, Viewzi, Mahalo, Searchme, Cooliris, etc.
NeXplore traffic has been steadily climbing and is now in the neighborhood of 4M unique visitors/month.
Don¹t take my word for it, check out
NeXplore vs the others on Compete.com.
Congrats!. Good to know that in a down market you were able to raise $20 million. Gives some hope to startups like JobsByRef.com.
Great going!
Kosmix does a good job culling information but it is lacking in ability to narrow topics. A colleague of mine recently wrote an article discussing this issue, “On Kosmix and Needles in Haystacks,” http://blog.hel...s-in-haystacks/. It makes sense that Righthealth would give Kosmix more traction since in those situations people want a broad stroke.