First Look: Want To Know Who Got Funded? WhoGotFunded.com Has Got You Covered

A lot of you have come to depend on TechCrunch for your startup funding news — and hey, we’re happy to be the first place you come when you’re looking to see who’s raising money. Which is why this new site, WhoGotFunded.com, is both a blessing and a curse: On the one hand, it’ll be an awesome tool for those of us hoping to catch all the latest funding news first. On the other hand, it maybe makes my job a bit obsolete?

Anyway, WhoGotFunded was first announced a few months ago, but it is now in private beta, and I’ve gotten a chance to check out the site. Touted as a one-stop shop for funding news, WhoGotFunded provides a list of the day’s funding announcements, which it gathers from Twitter, web news sites, and of course, the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The site was founded by Digimind, which specializes in competitive intelligence, data mining, and social media monitoring. It expects to publish about 100 to 150 new funding deals a day, based on more than 2 million news stories that it analyzes every day.

While it gathers information through text-mining technologies, WhoGotFunded also has what it calls a “human curation element” and hopes to open up to the community (a la Wikipedia) as a way to reduce the number of errors or false positives that might appear. It also shows detailed information about where the funding news appeared so that users can follow up and read more:

So who’s the target audience? Well, people like me, who are all about knowing all the latest funding news as part of their job. It’s also targeted at investors who want to keep abreast of the market. To that end, it’s already signed up about 2,000 subscribers already, including many employees from some top VC firms in the U.S. and Europe.

Once it comes out of beta, WhoGotFunded will offer tailored email alerts to let users know when a particular company closes funding, or when financing deals happen in a specific region or industry. While there’s always the opportunity to create value-added features on top of the platform, which many people would likely pay for, there are no plans for monetization right now — instead, Digimind is going to hold off until it sees what kind of reaction it receives from users.