People Search Engine Ark Gets More Money

May 1, 2012

The folks at Ark must be pretty pleased. All Things D reports, “People-Search Engine Ark Raises Biggest Y Combinator Seed Round in Memory.” The young company scored a remarkable $2 million in funding at Y Combinator‘s latest Demo Day, and now reports a total of $4.2 million in seed money raised so far. That puts the start-up in third place among all of Y Combinator’s companies in seed funding attraction.

Writer Liz Gannes describes Ark’s big idea:

“Ark is almost too good to be true — a search engine that combines public and personalized search for people. It promises to transcend the current stalemate in social search between Google, Twitter and Facebook.

“And it actually is too good to be true — right now, Ark is basically a simple interface to sort Facebook profiles by current city, gender, school, work, interests and other categories. Only 15,000 people have gotten beta access, as Ark has already fully maxed out its Amazon Web Services account by searching their networks and public data.”

Well, now they should be able to afford to upgrade their AWS account. CEO Patrick Riley aims to jump into the gap left by disharmony between Google and Facebook. It seems Zuckerberg’s company is more open to working with Ark than with its arch rival. Go figure.

I recommend checking out the article for more details about Ark’s plans. This will be a company to keep an eye on.

Cynthia Murrell, May 2, 2012

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.