We’ve contacted the company to confirm, but former engineer of the Israeli startup Aviran Mordo is reporting on his blog that the social search company Delver has failed to secure follow-up financing due to the drought in VC activity and will be closing shop in 30 days unless they find a buyer.
The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures, and was – according to Mordo’s blog post – unable to raise a second round between $6 and $8 million from the firm or other venture capitalists.
Delver came out of stealth mode only a year ago with an interesting approach to search that aimed to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs across the web. They opened up to the world about 6 months ago, recently announced a promising search deal with Yahoo BOSS, but apparently discovered that scaling search is very cost-intensive, and that there is plenty of competition and virtually no mass appeal when it comes to alternative search engines.
We’ll update this post as soon as we receive official word back from Delver.
Update: I just got off a call with Delver’s co-founder CEO Liad Agmon, who confirmed all of the above. Unless something miraculous happens, Delver goes into the deadpool.
A social search engine is a great idea, this is going far I can see it!
When will there be a new successful player in the search space?
We really need something fresh. I am getting bored with Google.
I would gladly offer a free dinner date with me if someone is able to create something worthwhile. I hope that will be some incentive!
Hi smartbabesaresexy,
Is this ‘dinner date’ offer valid for other worthwhile solutions than a search engine as well?
then give qitera.com a try – social search and sharing for trusted groups with full google-integration.
http://tinyurl.com/dm4p6z
we offer Art Basel (Europe) tickets for friends who bring in leads for our enterprise version:-)
For a good feel of what Delver has to offer, you may visit a few blogs with the Delver Widget installed:
http://ripper234.com/
http://lnbogen.com/
http://pashabitz.com/
Visiting each of this blogs gives you access to searching within the Blogger’s network . This can give you a quick glimpse at the the Delver experience.
Disclaimer – I work at Delver, this post represents my opinions alone and not that of the company.
I wonder when entrepreneurs today will be able to think of how to make businesses that make money.
It’s all sucking on the investor’s titties, one round, two rounds, three rounds.
Kudos to Linked in, they take money and they don’t even need it.
I guess Liad the CEO is gonna get Laid
and so will all his staff 
Sorry but his name was too funny to resist temptation
Search engines such as Delver are not being wise about there money. When they get the funding they waste it pretty darn quickly, I mean 4 million is plenty enough to hire a few servers & pay wages for at least a few years, so where does the rest of the money go? I don’t think they have spent much on marketing etc? Maybe our search engine is unique in this sense, but I really hope that in this credit crunch times, these web 2.0 companies can start to shape up.
I agree that there are def ways to bootstrap a bit and conserve cash but the reality is that if you want to attract top talent without divesting too much equity, you have to pay competitive salaries (competitive enough to make up for the risk inherent in working at a start-up).
Factor in the cost of benefits, outsourcing the accounting and HR, etc and you’ve got a pretty decent overhead without even taking into account any of the hardware, rental space, etc that comes into play.
4M is a lot of money, but it’s not that hard to burn through when you’re paying people competitive salaries and benefits.
I think social search has a place in the future but if you’ve visited Delver.com it appears you have to complete some sort of configuration process in order to perform a search. That’s not what users are accustomed to and therefore a major turn off. I’m sure there is some reason why they require this process and that same reason probably provides a clue to why nobody wants to give them more money.
I think that Demographic search is the key. A family branded search that blocks adult material will capture the 18 and under market and their parents.
Why is that a surprise?
The founders AND investors of search startups like Delver, Cuil, SearchMe and others should do a much better due-diligence before getting into this highly competitive space dominated by Google.
It is not about the product and not about marketing spend (you can ask Ask.com & Live.com). It is about changing peoples’ habits, and in the case of search it is pretty much impossible to change their mindset. Just wake up 100 people in the middle of the night and ask them to name a search engine, 99 will say one thing – Google. Sad, but true.
There are a lot of search engines coming and going. I just discovered a new search engine which appeared on the net a few days ago.
It’s called http://www.melzoo.com
Curious how they will be doing. They seem though to have a big advantage both for the visitor and the advertiser.
They have developed a search engine that provides the results of the search on the left side of a window and the actual web site is framed on the right. The correct web site is displayed immediately as the mouse hovers over each individual search result.
Some press releases are even comparing them with Google.
Why do you write in the third person?
How interesting. I think they were definitely confused about how to combine a search engine with a social network. When I found the profile they posted for me without my permission (pieced together with information they obviously copied from various sources all together with my full name and location, not in original formatting or original content as a cache would do), I was furious and tried to contact them several times. I explained that I did not want their service and certainly did not want my information publically posted on their site.
I think what they were trying to do was create the whole social search all at once rather than implementing many smaller steps that would entice actual users to register. They wasted too much time and energy mapping out, copying and posting “everyone’s” profiles without asking permission, making the whole search function irrelevant because there weren’t many real registered users.
Instead of “stealing” public information from myspace and facebook, they should have built their own network by heavily marketing a service to privately “manage” your online presence…profiles, articles, etc. Make it opt-in only and most importantly “confidential”, if you want a public profile of profiles, then that is your choice it should not be required. If you only want to find and organize your online profiles privately that is a valuable search service for many people (especially parents lol). If you want to post a public profile of profiles (social networks, blogs, articles, etc), it would be a valuable service for authors, musicians, business resumes, etc to have everything listed on one page with one url to link to and one central location to find people.
If there is such a service I have never heard of it, which is the problem!! Rapleaf has so much potential but I think they collect and sell information (?) and do not offer public profiles, and LinkedIn is more of a networking tool, it doesn’t “find” or “manage” accounts and there are connections/relationships involved. So pretty much, Delver could have been successful if only they had spent more time and energy on mass appeal and mass marketing.
No traffic=deadpool and thats delver !
to me that is bad news for this young and emergent market segment of social search. we need much more efforts to get social search going and as fast, relevant and intuitive as todays search on Google. most users need a smooth transition process and a lot of help to understand the value of socially-empowered search. therefore our company Qitera has just released its Google-integration tool “Qitera Assist” that fully integrates your personal (social) search index into the Google interface. http://tinyurl.com/dm4p6z today it looks like social search is most valued by information professional within big organization. so most of our revenue comes from the B2B space…but we hope that social search will make further inroads into the consumer web space in 2009…all the best for the Delver team…hope they find fresh cash…
@Tracey… Wow this is a sign of the times.
Someone putting their personal information on a social networking site and the being upset that it got loose?
Wake up and smell the coffee dude or dudette. You said it yourself… “Instead of “stealing” public information from myspace and facebook”
PUBLIC information. Get it? That’s public, as in you might as well paint it on the side of a cab in NYC.
When will folks understand that posting things to Facebook etal is like shouting your private business on the street corners of the world? If you wanted to have control of your data, DON’T put it on the net, at the very least DON’T put it on a social networking site.
Wake up and SMELL the Coffee… (unfortunately in these hard times it’s not Starbucks coffee anylonger…)
TC is here to keep us on top of the industries they cover. Like it or not that means reporting when companies succeed and when they fail.
Powerset recently sold for 100M and they’re in the search space. If you worked for a search company with significant value-add, you’d want to know who your competitors are, where they’ve faced their challenges, how they’ve succeeded and how they’ve failed.
It’s not publicity, it’s news.
Thanks Christian, but Lester is not really Lester, the past few minutes he’s also been ‘Thomas’, ‘Molly’ and ‘Michelle’. You’d think even trolls with nothing better to do know how to alternate their IP address. You’d be wrong.