ChaCha Reels In Another $14 Million in Series G Funding
February 9, 2013
ChaCha keeps on getting money. We learn about the outfit’s latest round of funding in All Things D’s piece, “ChaCha, Still Grinding Away at This Online Q&A Thing, Raises Another $14M.” Like Coveo ,it appears that ChaCha’s intake of investment is not yet generating an output of profit. Is its big pay day just around the corner?
Writer Liz Gannes sees the pattern, too, noting that the firm has now collected $82 million in funding. She reports that CEO Scott Jones believes his company has almost, after a history of ups and downs, conquered the Q&A conundrum. The key points: transitioning from the use of paid answerers to “passionate” (volunteer), identifiable sources; emphasizing social distribution over search; and offering brand-names the chance to share their wisdom, for a fee of course. Gannes writes:
“So: After clashing with Google by gaming its search results, ChaCha wants to take the even harder path of competing with Google head on, by trying to better answer the sort of quick questions Google now surfaces on results pages through its ‘Knowledge Graph.’
“But Jones said ChaCha can go further than Google because it has spent years focusing on how to answer ‘out and about’ questions about surroundings, make judgment calls and recommendations, and process phrasings that evade natural linguistic processing.
“And, in the meantime, ChaCha has built up an audience of 45 million uniques per month and two billion questions answered.”
Not too shabby, especially considering the setback the company experienced when it tangled with Google’s Panda in 2011. ChaCha has also found success with its “sponsored tweet scheme” Social Reactor, which pays out up to $100,000 per month to contracted tweeters. The distribution power associated with that program, says Jones, will help when the company pushes more forcefully into the mobile-app realm later this year. Let us hope ChaCha finds success soon; I’m sure their investors do.
ChaCha‘s free “ask-a-smart-friend” answer service can be accessed at chacha.com or through their mobile app. The company was formed in 2005, and currently employs 70 individuals. ChaCha is headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, just north of Indianapolis.
Cynthia Murrell, February 09, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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