Last month, at The Next Web Conference, Silk, an Amsterdam based startup won the TNW Startup Rally after two vigorous days of competition. Silk is an app for the web that helps you collect, sort and view the information that you need without making you comb through the data yourself. It also allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. This is an app that will allow you to better navigate the semantic web seas, also known as “Web 3.0″.
Today, Silk announced it has completed a €320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype. Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.
The new funds will be used to bring the product and technology to market and scale up development efforts. When asked more specifically what the funding will be used for, Silk’s CEO Salar al Khafaji says,
“It’s actually very ‘normal.’ We have been focused on development for that last year and a half, and now we need to do stuff like marketing, sales, talking to customers, etc. So the first thing we’re doing right now is working closely with content publishers who are looking to create more engaging content on the web (such as TNW). We’ll move to a self-service model around Q3, which means that people will be able to create their own Silk site just like they can create their own Blog.”
When asked how they celebrated, Salar answered, “So we didn’t have any time to celebrate at the time, but we have a good whisky collection at the office, which was very useful a few days afterwards for celebration purposes.”
Silk is currently working with us on The Next Web Index. It will be the first public Silk site will launch with. Silk is in private beta at the moment, but people can request invites to get early access to the product at the company’s website.
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Interested in learning more? See our full story on Silk’s launch here and our interview with Silk’s CEO and Co-founder Salar al Khafaji here.
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