Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Factual Pulls In $25M

Santa Monica-based Factual, the open dataset and API provider started by Gil Elbaz, announced this evening that it has raised $25M in a first round of funding. The funding was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, and also included Michael Ovitz and Ron Conway's SV Angel fund. As part of the funding, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures have joined the company's board of directors. Factual said the new funding will accelerate its rate of growth, expand its offerings, and go towards hiring talent. Factual is the latest startup of Gil Elbaz, who co-founded Applied Semantics, the firm which developed Google's AdSense product.

Elbaz, in an interview with socalTECH, said in particular the firm is looking to use the funding to bring in a lot more engineering talent to work on its platform, and will be hiring for a new office in Culver City, in Shanghai, and also for a new office to be opened in Silicon Valley.

Factual provides an online data platform and API which allows developers to access, modify, and collaborate on datasets. The firm currently hosts information such as data on businesses and other information. Elbaz said, in particular, that the firm's local data information is in high demand from developers of mobile and web applications. That data is being used by such partners as Facebook to power its Facebook Places check-in service. Factual previously had raised $2M in angel funding.

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