We got (at least) one thing wrong when we wrote about super-stealth search startup Cuill last week. We said we believed the company self funded after searching for venture capital. But we now have it from two solid sources that they actually raised a $4 million Series A round from Greylock Partners, with partner David Strohm taking a board seat.
Cuill, which was founded by husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, can supposedly index web pages at 1/10th the cost of Google (a significant competitive advantage) and has claims of relevance improvements over existing search engines. Patterson was until recently the architect of Google’s TeraGoogle, and the team also brought on Russell Power from TeraGoogle as well. The rumor is that they’ve continued to hire senior search experts away from Google, beyond the people listed on the site.
Greylock is behind some of the biggest success stories of the new Internet, including Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and others. Most of those investments are led by David Sze, however. Strohm only rarely seems to invest in the consumer sector.