Social Search Engine Delver On Death Watch

We’ve contacted the company to confirm, but former engineer of the Israeli startup Aviran Mordo is reporting on his blog that the social search company Delver has failed to secure follow-up financing due to the drought in VC activity and will be closing shop in 30 days unless they find a buyer.

The company has raised $4 million from a single investor, Carmel Ventures, and was – according to Mordo’s blog post – unable to raise a second round between $6 and $8 million from the firm or other venture capitalists.

Delver came out of stealth mode only a year ago with an interesting approach to search that aimed to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs across the web. They opened up to the world about 6 months ago, recently announced a promising search deal with Yahoo BOSS, but apparently discovered that scaling search is very cost-intensive, and that there is plenty of competition and virtually no mass appeal when it comes to alternative search engines.

We’ll update this post as soon as we receive official word back from Delver.

Update: I just got off a call with Delver’s co-founder CEO Liad Agmon, who confirmed all of the above. Unless something miraculous happens, Delver goes into the deadpool.