14 DAY TRIAL // Real-time search engine OneRiot raised $7 million dollars in funding from its investors: Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital. After securing deals with Yahoo and Microsoft, the Colorado-based company has managed to convince its investors that the real-time search engine market is here to stay.
With these latest funds, raised as Series C stock, OneRiot racked up around $27 million dollars from its investors since the company's birth in November 2008. $20 million were raised as Me.dium, its former name. About $15 million of those came from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, an old supporter of the search engine provider.
The success of the company might have been confirmed to investors when Microsoft signed a deal with OneRiot to include it in its browser search engine list, releasing an Internet Explorer 8 add-on along the way.
While the real-time search engine has grown along with the development of social networks and social media publishing websites, Google showed some interest in this domain, announcing, in June 2009, the future release of a micro-blogging search in the near future.
Twitter has also shown interest in real-time searches capitalizing on its knowledge acquired with the development of its internal search.
On the stock market, real-time search engine providers have been successful lately, competitors like Topsy and Collecta raising similar amounts of money ($15 million, and $2 million, respectively).
“This commitment from our existing investors is a big vote of confidence in the realtime search market, OneRiot’s product offering, and our team’s ability to execute,” said Kimbal Musk, OneRiot’s CEO. He added that “Increasingly, the web’s most relevant content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. [...] Using OneRiot people can find that content in realtime.”
The confidence coming from Mr. Musk's statement is the result of releasing the PulseRank algorithm, a method of actively indexing social network statuses, messages or any kind of content in real time. OneRiot has also recently launched an API for its services, allowing developers to tap into their services in an attempt to take over the real-time search market.