OneRiot, the real-time search engine, has just announced a new $7 million Series C funding round led by Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital. The company blog has just posted more information.
While the real-time search space is particularly hot at the moment, OneRiot has been focusing on opening up and expanding its APIs to allow others to tap into its data. Partners include Yahoo and Microsoft, who of course, will also soon be much closer in the search space. Meanwhile, search titan Google is said to be very interested in the real-time space and is exploring its own way of doing things. And then of course there is Twitter which currently offers search based on its Summize acquisition, but is also said to have something bigger in the works.
Much of the Twitter Search expansion talk revolves around looking at the link data (something which Twitter was apparently doing the other day before it pulled the test down). That also happens to be what OneRiot specializes in, scouring the real-time space, crawling for links, rather than simply status updates. But they’re also clearly aware of the power of Twitter in the real-time space, as they recently launched a RiotFeeds product that breaks down links from Twitter into different categories.
The company last raised a large $15 million round in the summer of 2007, before it was even known as OneRiot. Back then, it was known as Me.dium, and was more of a StumbleUpon-type product. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $27 million over three rounds. This new money will be used to improve three key area of the service: Speed, scale and relevance, we’re told.
OneRiot’s CEO is Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s younger brother.