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Cha Cha Cha Raises Another $30M

Submitted by: Theodore Tanner on Jan 26, 2009 at 3:18 pm Tagged with: Search engines, semantic intelligence, Venture Capital Source: techcrunch.com

comment from theodore calhoun tanner jr.:

Amazing that a human based search engine is getting this traction. People want more related content without the drudgery of thinking about what to search for with keywords. This is the type of risk taking level the southeast needs that I believe was discussed at the Enterprise forum with respect to "rockstar" companies. As I attended a search related VC endeavor years ago, there was a VC that was ridiculed for investing in yet another search company. When the investor was asked why they invested in a company with a weird name when there were already other search engines such as askjeeves,lycos,altavista et al he said "well it can always get better and we think the name is cool, - google".

Wow. ChaCha Is Raising Another $30 Million

by Robin Wauters on January 26, 2009

ChaCha, the human-powered answers service we’ve written about quite a bit here on TechCrunch, is raising a Series C round of $30 million, of which close to $11 million has already been secured according to a regulatory filing, reports peHUB. The filing doesn’t list any new shareholders.

The company raised $6 million in Series A financing exactly two years ago from Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions, followed by a $10 million round by Morton Meyerson and 21st Century Technology Fund. If ChaCha closes the $30 million Series C round, the total capital invested in the company will amount up to a whopping $46 million.

In case you’ve never heard of ChaCha, it’s essentially a search engine that lets users ask questions to a real person, called a “search guide”, via a chat interface both on the web and mobile. We’ve called it a dumb idea in the past, and unscalable on numerous occasions, but it’s not the only startup that’s taking a crack at a human-powered Q&A service (Mahalo launched a similar service last month, Answerly is another one).