Menlo Park search engine start-up, SPOCK has raised $7 million from Clearstone and Opus Capital Ventures. This is SPOCK’s first round of venture capital funding. Previously, SPOCK raised $1 million of incubation funding from Clearstone Venture Partners, thus placing SPOCK as an $8 million-backed company.
SPOCK is currently in private beta and is focused on the search of people. If you type in a name into the search, then SPOCK would be able to bring up a picture, address, occupation, and other information [CNET]. “When Spock launches, it will have 100 million profiles of people in its database” stated Matt Marshall. Through the new round of funding, William Quigly of Clearstone and Ken Elefant of Opus and Siva Kumar, a chief executive of TheFind.com will join the SPOCK board of directors.
Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will be competitors of SPOCK, but those search engines are not people-focused. Another potential competitor of SPOCK mentioned by CNET is ZoomInfo. Michael Kanellos of CNET writes “in my own personal tests of ZoomInfo’s deluxe service, I found more information about individuals on Google than through their service.” I wholeheartedly agree with that.
I conducted a search on my own name on ZoomInfo and the only result found was an Undersecretary-General of Pittsford Mendon High School.
