Minekey Gets $3 Million In Series A Funding from NEA IndoUS Ventures

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Minekey Gets $3 Million In Series A Funding from NEA IndoUS Ventures

Minekey, a company that enables content discovery on the Internet via widgets, has received $3 million in Series A funding led by NEA-IndoUS Ventures. Minekey was founded by Delip Andra in 2005 and incubated at IIT Kharagpur. It’s headquartered at Sunnyvale, California. By the looks of it, the company seems to have a publisher focus, also allowing them to syndicate their own content via the Minekey widgets. The widget provides recommendations based on content on the page, and what readers have read in the past. But the success for Minekey will be in getting more and more publishers to sign up, also competing against the likes of Sphere and del.icio.us.

This also reminds me of a point that Fred Wilson had made on Last.fm versus Pandora, both services for discovering new music. I’m with him in this debate - I prefer human recommendations over algorithm based recommendations (hence also prefer Last.fm over Pandora). What about you?

Nikhil Pahwa Aug 2, 2007 11:59 PM ET

Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital, Social Media

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Pranav

Delip

thanks for the update and good luck with minekey - you've got a great buzz going :-)

Delip

Nikhil,

Thanks for talking about Minekey. I hope you'll try the Minekey widget on your blog some time soon :-).

Recommendations based on social aspects or by friends (human recommendations) etc., is an integral component of Minekey's approach. While some of that may not be very evident right now - you'll see interesting features in the next couple weeks which will make this aspect clear.

BTW - Pandora vs. Last.fm is a very interesting conversation. Howevr, you might appreciate that in music domain it is very difficult to extract the metadata of the music and hence the inherent difficulty in recommending. Also, social behaviour is very strong in music domain. Fan groups and Tribes for music started in music much before the internet. Hence the popularity of Last.fm over Pandora.

Prashant,

Since there isn't much meta data about Music (songs, albums) - Pandora is hiring several part time musicians to develop detailed attributes of music titles. While they did a great job at this - there are several challenges in this approach and keeping up with the pace of music evolution is very difficult. Hence the popularity of Last.fm and iLike etc.,.

Pranav,

We had completed our first closing ($ 600 K) in Decmber of 2006. But, we hadn't announced the funding back then. Press/ bloggers picked up this information from Minekey's SEC filings. $ 3 Mln round closed just 2 weeks back. This is the first and only time we made an official announcement.

Pranav

Nikhil,

I thought this was old news - hadnt they got the funding way back in jan - feb ?
I was pretty sure I'd read about that, so I went digging around and here's what I found on their blog:

http://www.minekey.com/blog/2007/01/31/people-have-started-talking-about-us/

(The BW story too mentions the $3 mill. )

I'm not really sure why this news has resurfaced elsewhere too - probably a PR stunt I guess.