Quintura, an up and coming search engine is now backed by Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that is proved to be visionary investors by providing initial investments into Skype. Quintura’s See & Findâ„¢ search technology utilizes tag clouds in addition to search results. The algorithms surrounding Quintura has been developed over the course of several years through Quintura’s U.S. and Russia-based engineers.
“Our team approached the problem of finding Internet-based information and entertainment from the standpoint of the user” stated Yakov Sadchikov, the co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We strived to build something that made it as easy as possible for the user to find exactly what they are looking for as quickly as possible. We also wanted to make the user experience very visual and more enjoyable, so we built in visual navigation technologies that are more appealing to users.”
Yesterday the investment announcement was made. The total investment is undisclosed. ABRT Venture Fund and the partners of OpenView Venture Partners of Boston were also involved in this round of investment into Quintura.
“We have found the team of Mangrove being a visionary investor and very intelligent partner in developing our consumer driven Internet business.” said Yakov Sadchikov, co-founder and CEO of Quintura. “We plan using the venture capital to take the Web by storm and reach millions of web users globally when launching the Quintura visual find engines for various user communities. We are also starting an affiliate program for most popular web-sites and blogs such as Digg, Netscape, and others where they can easily make their current tag clouds very interactive.”
Although the Quintura search results are created by Yahoo! XML, the user interface, the tag cloud feature, and the Save It! and Share It! features are unheard of anywhere else. By surrounding the search keywords with other relevant keywords from the Meta tags in the search results, users can optimize their search engine experience.
Here is a sample screenshot of a search on “Bill Gates”:
Notice the accuracy of the tag cloud? Words such as “chairman,” “microsoft,” “melinda,” and “foundation” have been other suggested searches in the cloud. Investment in such a company proves that search engine technology is becoming a booming market once again and the next Google could be right in front of us.
Quintura, Inc. is a U.S. corporation with offices setup in Alexandria, Virginia. Quintura’s software development operations are based in a region of Moscow in Russia. Quintura is planning on offering blog and web publishers an affiliate program to display Quintura clouds on their websites in the near future. The Qunitura team has a blog and has also announced that they have an image visual search as well at http://www.quintura.ru/. On August 2006, Business 2.0 featured Quintura as one of the world’s hottest startups.
Instructure is a company that has developed an open source learning management system. Instructure has raised $8 million in Series B funding from OpenView Venture Partners, EPIC Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s venture capital company Tomorrow Ventures, and Tim Draper. Instructure raised a total of $9.2 million. Instructure’s software called Canvas includes assessment tools, discussions, web chat, multiple assignment submission types, drag-and-drop file uploads, HTML5 video, and speech-to-text conversion.
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