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.

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.