Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Atlas Ventures http://pulse2.com Sat, 26 May 2012 21:27:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 People Search Engine Ark Raises $4.2 Million In Seed Round http://pulse2.com/2012/04/25/people-search-engine-ark-raises-4-2-million-in-seed-round/ http://pulse2.com/2012/04/25/people-search-engine-ark-raises-4-2-million-in-seed-round/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:55:34 +0000 Amit Chowdhry http://pulse2.com/?p=60331 Continue reading →]]>
Ark is a people search engine launched at Y Combinator Demo Day that has raised $4.2 million in a seed round of funding. Ark crawls Facebook, RenRen, LinkedIn, and Twitter to find out as much data as possible. The founders at Ark got the idea for the startup when they found out that 30% of searches are for people.

In March 2012, Ark indexed over 1 billion people from their social networking data. About 250,000 people have signed up for beta invites.

The $4.2 million seed round is the largest that any Y Combinator has received. Investors in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, Greylock Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, and Felicis Ventures. Angel investors from Facebook, Salesforce.com, Qualcomm, and Microsoft also participated in this round.

Ark currently has 20 people on staff and they plan to hire more for their mobile and search engineering teams. Ark started in summer 2011 and their search engine was developed during the Y Combinator Winter Program.

]]> http://pulse2.com/2012/04/25/people-search-engine-ark-raises-4-2-million-in-seed-round/feed/ 0 Social Learning Startup Grockit Raises $7 Million http://pulse2.com/2011/10/17/social-learning-startup-grockit-raises-7-million/ http://pulse2.com/2011/10/17/social-learning-startup-grockit-raises-7-million/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:26:45 +0000 Amit Chowdhry http://pulse2.com/?p=52071 Continue reading →]]>
Grockit is a social learning startup company that has raised $7 million in Series D. Current investor Atlas Ventures led the round. Existing investors Benchmark and Integral Capital also participated. New investors NewSchools Venture Fund and GSV Capital CEO Michael Moe participated in this round.

Grockit has test preps for the SAT, GMAT, and LSAT. It also has high school AP classes. Their latest service is called Grockit Answers, a website that creates Q&A pages for any videos on YouTube.

Grockit passed its 10 millionth answered question milestone. Grockit is getting close to 100 million chat messages too. The website has about 1 million total registered users. About 25,000 to 50,000 are active at any given month.

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