Monitior110, the pre-launch web monitoring service for hedge fund traders we wrote about in September, will announce on Monday that it has closed a Series C round of financing with $11 million from new and existing investors. The company, which will begin offering its product for general subscription early next year after three years of development, has now raised a total of $20 million.
The service tracks information from now 50 million sources, analyzes it for topical relevance and delivers near real time alerts to customers. It focuses on blog, deep web and static web changes. Topical expertise evaluation is an important part of the secret sauce.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson led this round of funding and Ron Conway is the most prominent new investor. The company claims to have spent very little of its investors money so far. Longtime financial markets AI geek David J. Leinweber has also joined the Monitor110 board of advisors.
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I know what I want for Christmas. It’s going to be expensive, but Monitor110 is already making beta testers money. It’s a real time research suite tracking RSS, deep web, static web changes and many other sources with multiform alerts, semantic analysis, extensive domain knowledge concerning financial markets and high profile VC backing.
The company was profiled in the Financial Times last night, but we have exclusive details and the first public screenshot of the service.
Almost three years in development, with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson amongst others, Monitor110 is set to launch in early 2007. It looks a lot like big parts of my research system (which I take great pride in) rolled into one very smart, automated system. High level knowledge workers in the future are likely to combine Monitor110 for what we call feed reading today with something like SystemOne for a CMS and Touchstone for alerts. Just as Root Markets is taking attention to financial markets first, Monitor110 is focused at launch on hedge funds. People who deal in pure money are probably the only market that is ready for these kinds of technologies on a large scale today, though individuals in any field could well use them to gain a competitive advantage.
Monitor110 gathers information from 40 million sources of various types (100 million by the end of next year they say), ranked by financial market knowledge through a proprietary algorithm that takes 50 factors into account – inbound links being just one reputation metric. Users can chose between top sources preselected for their market sector and subscribe to sources of their own. Static sites can be monitored for changes with good granularity. Premium subscription and other deep web sources, blogs, forums, news and regulatory filings are among the sources included. The end results will be delivered through the company’s RSS reader with email, IM and SMS alerts as appropriate.
Rather than keyword search, the company’s technology is based on conceptual or semantic search. Those conceptual search results are prioritized relative to key events in industry news.
If you’re familiar with the consumer online research space, think Technorati plus Pubsub plus Sphere plus WatchThatPage plus NexisLexis plus Newsgator white label plus Rasasa – with vertical search domain knowledge overlaid that targets people who’s bread is buttered by getting key information first.
I know that I struggle with piecing together a research infrastructure similar to Monitor110’s with quite a few different services. To have all of the above functions rolled into one service is a very exciting prospect.
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