Stealth startup Pushd secures more funding for mysterious product
Pushd, a San Francisco-based stealth startup with rock star social networking talent, has bagged another $1 million from anonymous investors last week, an SEC filing picked up by VentureBeat reveals. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $2.35 million.
Established in 2012, Pushd is led by Abdur Chowdhury, who made a name for himself in Silicon Valley after launching a social search firm called Summize with former Twitter CTO Greg Pass. The microblogging giant acquired the startup for $15 million last year, appointing Chowdhury as its chief scientist and hiring fellow Summize co-founder Eric Jensen to direct search engine development.
Jensen, who holds a doctorate in computer science with a specialization in “evaluating search systems,” is listed as president in an SEC form filed after Pushd’s original $1.35 million funding round last year. But his LinkedIn profile shows that he served as CTO, a position that he has apparently since left. Chowdhury is still at the helm, however, as is co-founder Chris Carella, who is currently head of product. He had previously worked for Skype, which he joined after helping to create a now-defunct topical conversation platform called Subjot.
The rest of the crew is just as noteworthy, with engineers Matt Sanford and Ben Cherry both hailing from Twitter. Pushd has so far remained tight-lipped about the kind of technology it will sell, but judging by the team’s background, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the company is building some sort of social search product.
Rising demand for analytics is spurring startups on both coasts: in Seattle, Nurego recently raised $2 million to accelerate the development of its cloud-based Big Data solution for service providers. The company was founded by two VMware executives, and Paul Maritz, the virtualization giant’s former CEO, serves on its board.