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January 23, 2007
Wikio Raises €4M From International VCs
Luxembourg-based Wikio announced today a Series A round of €4M ($5.3M ) led by Silicon Valley-based Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds. Wikio is a personalized blog and news aggregator and search tool with a user voting mechanism. It is available in French, Spanish, German and Italian and recently launched an English version.
It's a tool that can help take control of the web information you consume, but it takes a while to understand how it works, or it least it took this reporter a while. But once you figure it out it has some nice features.
The quality of the service all depends, just like Google News or any other similar program, on the speed of delivery of the hits, and on the company being able to stock it up with good news and blog sources. We tried venture finance searches and found that there could be some improvement in the range and number of sources.
The business model relies on sponsored links and monetization of commercial searches, the firm said.
The startup was founded by CEO Laurent Binard, whose last venture was called Mediapps, an Internet portal software startup that was founded during the last venture cycle. Chairman and blogging evangelist for the startup is Pierre Chappaz, the co-founder of Kelkoo, who sold it to Yahoo for half a billion, and then went on to join Index Ventures as entrepreneur in residence. He's now also co-CEO of Netvibes, the startpage company.
Wikio's seed investors were: Loic Le Meur (an executive at Sixapart Europe), Martin Varsavsky (CEO of FON), Freddy Mini (COO Netvibes), Ouriel Ohayon (Editor Techcrunch France and a manager of Lightspeed Gemini Internet Lab), and venture investor and blogger Jeff Clavier.
Read - Wikio Secures $5.3 Million in Series A Funding (press release)
Posted on January 23, 2007 04:10 PM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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