Contextual search startup InfoAxe has raised $3 million in Series A funding today from Stephen
Oskoui, CEO of online advertising company Smiley Media. The startup had previously raised $900,000 in seed funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Labrador Ventures, Band of Angels and Amidzad Partners. Gokul Rajaram, the “godfather of Google AdSense, has joined InfoAxe’s board.
InfoAxe, which launched in 2008, offers an alternative search engine that focuses on indexing your own browsing history to provide you more contextual results in searches. The site essentially delivers personalized recommendations based on your past browsing history. The site also offers a toolbar that allows users to ‘record’ public web browsing sessions, which they can search through their personal history from the toolbar itself or the Infoaxe website.
In two years, InfoAxe says that it has gained 4 million users and is bookmarking 20 million webpages based on user browsing on the platform per day. The startup’s co-founder Jonathan Siddharth says Infoaxe is approaching profitability and is currently looking to hire more engineers.
Last fall, the startup launched a real time search engine that relies on attention data generated by InfoAxe’s web history search engine.