Former Googler Sanjeev Agrawal To Lead Just-Funded Mobile Search Startup Aloqa

Today’s a big day for Aloqa, a fledgling mobile search and information services company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The startup will be announcing at Venturebeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference that they have just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners.

Aloqa will seize the opportunity to present its context-aware mobile application for Android – currently in beta and available on Android Market for a limited time – on stage and boast about its newly appointed CEO: Sanjeev Agrawal, former Global Head of Google Product Marketing and subsequently VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft) will take the helm.

Aloqa is one of many startups betting big on location-aware search and information provision services for mobile phones. The app proactively notifies users about interesting places, services, events, and (Facebook) friends in their immediate neighborhood. All users need to do is look at their phone and the service will display live information about interesting things in their vicinity. Aloqa refreshes itself automatically when users change locations, which comes in handy when you’re mobile.

Aloqa also provides an API for easy development of location-based services, especially for proactive and community oriented applications. Examples: detecting the proximity of two mobile targets (such as Facebook friends) automatically, sorting a buddy list by current distance and automatically updating the list as well as clique observation (“show me when 3 out of 5 of my myspace girlfriends are nearby”).

According to Aloqa, the application will be made fully available on “most major mobile platforms” through the fall of 2009, and will work on both GPS- and non-GPS enabled handsets and on any carrier network.

Looks like a great platform, but they’re entering a very crowded space.

You can see a demo video from the startup’s homepage.