Factual: $1 Million From Angels

Factual, a developer of a database of facts, on Wednesday attracted $1 million in angel funding from a who's who of technology investors including Internet browser pioneer Marc Andreessen.

Los Angeles-based Factual is assembling an open database of information to be used by developers in building software applications.

"What we see is the new wave is that there is really a way for factual data to be accessible," founder Gil Elbaz said. "We built a platform that helps the community have good, fresh data, and we have all the tools that make that data available."

Mr. Elbaz, who previously co-founded Applied Semantics (now AdSense), acquired by Google in 2003, courted no shortage of marquee angel investors.

Besides funding from the Andreessen Horowitz fund, investors included Index Ventures partner Danny Rimer, Esther Dyson, Idealab Chairman Bill Gross, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, About.com founder Scott Kurnit, Miramar Venture Partners, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Gerson Lehrman Group founder Thomas Lehrman, Rustic Canyon Ventures founder Tom Unterman, the Founder Collective, Gunderson Dettmer, as well as Lee and June Stein.

What Factual hopes to do is become the de facto database for all forms of data that can be built into applications for the Internet, computers, and such mobile devices as iPhones and iPads. The startup's main audience is those developers that need certain forms of information to feed into their applications.

Formed in October 2009, Factual is planning to use the funding to build up its nascent idea. By year's end, the company may be prepared to seek institutional investors as the idea further develops, according to Mr. Elbaz. At this point, the company is still exploring different revenue models and hasn't decided which direction to go.

If Factual's idea seems new, it's not entirely. San Francisco-based Metaweb has operated an open database of information, dubbed Freebase, since March 2007. Metaweb has landed $57 million in two rounds of funding since 2006. Factual's founder views Metaweb's funding as an endorsement of the niche and said that the two companies appear to be headed in different directions, but he noted there are opportunities to benefit from each other's data gathering.

"It's very much a world of coopetition," Mr. Elbaz said.
by Red Herring Staff

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