Recommendation engine Hunch confirms that they’ve raised a new round of financing – $12 million – led by Khosla Ventures. Partner Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla Ventures last year, was previously the CFO of Facebook. He is now joining Hunch’s board of directors as part of the deal. Hunch was valued at $52 million in the round.
I spoke to cofounder Caterina Fake this evening about the round. Fake says that Hunch, which is less than a year old, now has lots of data to work with in making recommendations. In fact, she says, users have answered nearly 50 million questions on Hunch since launch, and the company can use that data to make better and better recommendations.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined the company’s board of directors in late 2009.
Hunch is a consumer web application that is building the “taste graph” of the internet, mapping every person on the internet to every entity on the internet and their affinity for that entity. An entity could be a web site, a cookbook, a hotel room, a celebrity, a restaurant, etc. Hunch creates a taste profile by asking them a series of questions which range from serious to profound and subsequently can make recommendations personalized to that user, which live in...
Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems. The firm focuses on environmentally friendly technologies in addition to the traditional venture areas such as the Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology arenas.
Gideon is currently a General Partner at Khosla Ventures. Previously, Gideon was the Chief Financial Officer of Facebook, where he led the $375 million investment round from Microsoft and Hong-Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing at a record $15 billion valuation. Before that, Gideon was a Partner at Sequoia Capital, and was also the Chief Financial Officer at YouTube where he negotiated its $1.65 billion sale to Google amidst a highly competitive auction for the company. Prior to YouTube, Gideon...
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