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London-based Zemanta raises more seed funding overseas (update: the amount is $700,000)

robin Written on 15th September 2008                                                                                                              7 COMMENTS some text
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

London based Zemanta raises more seed funding overseas (update: the amount is $700,000)Union Square Ventures, the NY venture capital firm that blogging investor Fred Wilson is a partner with, has injected $700,000 in early stage funding into blogging tool Zemanta, Venturebeat says (and the startup confirms).

Zemanta is a London/Slovenia based startup who has built a platform that caters to online content producers, by contextually matching new stuff with existing content and consequently suggesting relevants third-party links, keywords, text, images, and even videos in a sidebar. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in. You can demo the solution here.

London based Zemanta raises more seed funding overseas (update: the amount is $700,000)

Zemanta was one of the winners of Seedcamp 2007, and raised $ 1,5 million in seed funding shortly thereafter from The Accelerator Group and Eden Ventures. In today’s blog post, the company talks numbers:

“A year has passed since than and Zemanta has become a respectable force in the blogging world. We now support more than 10 platforms, numerous versions, serve suggestions from 2500 sources, professional images…everything you need to enhance your blogging experience.  We touch several million readers each month and zemify 1000 posts each day. We invented the way how computer helps bloggers enhance blog posts, introduced quoting of the posts as a cross platform concept(Reblog), aggregation page of mostly suggested posts (Popular) and seen phenomenal response from the community.”

All in all, it’s great for a European company to get funding and acknowledgment from overseas, and certainly a high-profile one like Union Square Ventures. Zemanta definitely has a great future ahead. I haven’t used the service myself, but I believe my co-editors here at The Next Web blog are actually pretty big fans.

On Thursday, Zemanta plans to release a new version of the platform, shifting from being a general suggestion service to a personalized service. You’ll be able to upload your sources and limit the suggestion pool to your sources, you’ll be able to search through your Flickr account and point Zemanta to your Twitter account to get related blogs from your friends. The company has also redesigned its UI and streamlined the blogging experience.

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

7 comments/trackbacks to “London-based Zemanta raises more seed funding overseas (update: the amount is $700,000)”

  1. Sep 15, 2008: The Semantic Web mobile edition

    [...] it’s investing an undisclosed seed round in the startup.” TheNextWeb.org followed up, and reported the investment as $700,000, or almost €0.5M. Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK reports the sum [...]

  2. Sep 18, 2008: Internet: Zemanta - Bloggea mejor - Bitelia

    [...] articles by ZemantaLondon-based Zemanta raises more seed funding overseas (update: the amount is $700,000)ZemantaZemanta: Great idea, poor execution ← Anterior | Inicio Comparte esta anotación [...]

  3. Feb 24, 2009: SoftWave » Poticanje ulaganja

    [...] da im se obrati, ali to je jedna kap u oceanu. A u međuvremenu drugi pokreću Skypeove i Zemante, dok naši poduzetnici svoje projekte rade negdje [...]

  1. By Philip Baddeley on Sep 15, 2008

    I saw your comment on Fred Wilson’s blog. You fill in more of the picture so thanks. Will add you to my reader.

    Reply

  2. By Andraz Tori on Sep 16, 2008

    Hi!

    Thanks for publishing the info, you were pretty fast!

    We are really happy to have all the support we are seeing from Europe! We’d like to thank you all and we’ll work even harder now :)

    bye
    Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta

    Reply

  3. By Primož Verdnik on Sep 16, 2008

    Congrats to Andraž and Zemanta!

    It’s really great to see what a small passionate and commited team can achieve. And from Slovenia no less :)

    I hope this will inspire other startups from Slovenia.

    Reply

  4. By Donna Hill on Jan 10, 2009

    hi
    o0vs28i50r9gqp1y
    good luck

    Reply

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