Google rival Kosmix raises $20m in funding

by Dan Leahul, Brand Republic 09-Dec-08, 11:45

LONDON - Kosmix, the Silicon Valley search engine backed by Facebook and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, has raised $20m in a funding round led by Time Warner, as it gears up to take on Google.

Time Warner's investment brings the total funding for Kosmix to $55m (£37.2m), adding to $35m raised from venture capitalists including Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dag Ventures earlier this year.

Kosmix has also added former Motorola chief executive Ed Zander to its ranks. He is acting as an investor and strategic advisor after helping raise the previous $35m.

The beta version of the search engine, which was launched yesterday, differs slightly from Google as it lets users explore search results in a "dashboard"-style page with relevant videos, photos, news, opinion and communities of the search topic.

Kosmix co-founder Anand Rajaraman said Google is "great at finding needles in the haystack" and "the best bet for finding specific information". However, Kosmix offers a broad "360 degree" view of information surrounding a certain topic.

For example, a search for Stonehenge reveals places to stay in Bath, Somerset, other ancient monuments in the same area, Flickr photo pages and Twitter feeds, among other relevant topics, including Google search results.

Kosmix plans to monetise its site by adding ads to its results pages, similar to Google's AdWords programme. The website will also include AdWords results.

The company was founded by Rajaraman and friend Venky Harinarayan who made it big in 1998 when Amazon acquired their online shopping start-up Junglee for $250m.

Last year, the pair achieved further success with the medical resource website RightHealth, which uses the same search algorithm as Kosmix, and became the web's second-largest US health site in the space of a year, attracting 11m users a month.