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Search - Friday, November 17, 2006

Hakia Takes $11M Via The Funding Road Less Travelled

New York-based search start-up Hakia has raised $11M by either eschewing venture capital or being told too many times to take a hike away from Sand Hill. Investors are:
+ Poland's Prokom Investments (oil, real estate, IT, financial and biotech investor)
+ Turkey's KVK (Mobile teleco)
+ Turkish angel investor Murat Vargi (founder of Turkcell)
+ Malaysia's Lu Pat Ng, who represented his family, which has substantial investments in companies worldwide.
+ Finland's Dr. Pentti Kouri (Former Nokia board in the 1980s. He has taught at Stanford, Yale, New York University, and Helsinki University, and worked as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is currently based in New York.
+ The United States' Alexandra Investment Management (hedge fund.
+ Former Senator Bill Bradley

We spent some time on Hakia. High concept: instead of relying on indexing the web or relying on the popularity of particular web pages, as many search engines do, Hakia tries to match the meaning of the search terms to mimic the cognitive processes of the human brain. To us, it feels like a nicer Ask Jeeves. A search on Orlando Bloom, for example, gives us a photo of the thespian, news headlines, biography and timeline, filmography, fan sites, contact info, etc. A google search on Orlando Blum returns a very different result, based on popularity of links.

Our opinion of Hakia: its not there yet. Searchers will not swtich from Google. Something tells us they need a specialty, like Zillow did for real estate price search. They need something that you can only do on Hakia.

View - Hakia site