Beepl, a startup that bills itself as an expertise platform and semantic technology company (with a straight face, no less!), has raised seed funding from Prague-based VC firm Credo Ventures. Beepl was co-founded by chief executive Steve O’Hear, who just left TechCrunch to get a taste of tech startup life, and even he wouldn’t tell us how much they’ve raised other than to say it was a “six figure amount”.
He should have known better, because we’ve learned from sources that the capital raised amounts to approximately $400,000 (sorry, Steve!).
Comprised of a founding team from Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, Beepl was incorporated in April 2011 and is headquartered in London.
The company will be in stealth mode for the next few months, but from what I’ve gathered they’re building a platform that will enable users to get quality answers to their questions, as well as opinions from relevant topic experts, enthusiasts and their social graph.
In PR lingo, the way they plan to pull this off sounds something like this:
“Beepl achieves this through a bespoke semantic engine that employs natural language processing and machine learning to both understand the topics that questions relate to and users’ interests and expertise.”
A better Q&A mousetrap, in other words, or dare we say, a better Quora? We’ll find out soon enough.
In November 2012, Beepl was acquired by Brand Embassy for an undisclosed sum. Around the same time, the consumer-facing Q&A site was taken off-line. Founded in April 2011, Beepl let users seek answers and opinion from subject specialists, enthusiasts and their social graph. Following a three month long private alpha, the Q&A site launched publicly on 16th January 2012 to widespread media coverage. In July 2011, Beepl announced that it had raised a ‘six figure’ seed round led by Credo Ventures,...
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