Quintura gets several million dollars for further growth

Quintura’s blog often features in stories all over the blogosphere (read about their secret here), but now their product, the visual search engine, will be the talk of the day. CEO Yakov Sadchikov has just mailed me that his company has received several million dollars in bridge funding from leading European early-stage venture capital investor Mangrove Capital Partners as a part of new financing round.

The funding will help to scale the site search platform and grow monthly audience of Quintura Site Search from its current 8 million to 50 million in 2009. That’s quite an ambition, but the search engine is doing a good job already. Quintura offers its services to men’s magazine Maxim as well as tech blog ReadWriteWeb (talking about a diverse group of customers). But further growth is needed anyhow. In order to achieve this, Russian-based Quintura has hired Dennis Szerszen as US-based Chief Marketing Officer.

When I interviewed Sadchikov a while ago, he told me he aims for his product to be the “iPhone of search“. The search results already look quite good, but it isn’t such a visual spectacle as the famous shiny object yet. Sadchikov will need more money for that, that’s why he will use Mangrove’s capital for bringing in new venture capital investors as well.