UPDATED 11:00 EDT / FEBRUARY 11 2016

NEWS

Profitable AI startup Diffbot raises $10m Series A

Artificial intelligence startup Diffbot, Inc. has raised $10 million Series A in a round led by Tencent Holdings Ltd. that included Felicis Ventures, Valor Capital, Amplify Ventures, Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Lee and Georges Harik.

Founded in 2010, Diffbot uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to build a structured database of objects and facts from across the entire internet, which they claim is bigger than Google’s Knowledge Graph.

The company’s technology visually recognizes, reads, understands, and monitors Web pages and components including product pages, news articles, discussions/comments/forums, videos, pictures, and more, with each element then extracted, organized, tagged, cross-referenced, and stored as an “object” in the Global Index.

This organized data allows applications and machines to easily access every piece of information contained on the web.

Diffbot doesn’t provide a search service but instead offers businesses a host of turnkey APIs, automatic web-crawling, and bulk data processing capabilities, to allow applications to leverage previously unstructured Web data.

The company says that because it offers a structured, constantly updated database of information pulled from the internet, they can treat all of this information as a searchable “Big Data” set – pulling out only the pieces of information that are relevant to their company or product.

Even if you’ve not heard of them before, Diffbot is already providing services to a range of companies most would know, including Microsoft (Bing), Cisco, Adobe, Yandex, eBay, and many others.

Profitable

It’s rare to see a unicorn that is profitable, but Diffbot goes into the round with a proven business model that is making serious money.

“What truly makes [Diffbot] an amazing investment is that, unlike many ‘unicorns,’ Diffbot has identified a high-margin, high-leverage business model in AI that is only limited in its data collection capabilities by the size of an easily expanded data center,” Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE.

Dig below the surface and the numbers are also truly amazing, with Diffbot’s “Global Index” containing more than 1.2 billion objects, and is adding another 10 million every single day, and all using AI without being manually curated.

Including the new round Diffbot has raised $12.5 million to date.

The company said it would use the new funding to expand their already profitable technology across the entire Web and to add more world-class AI experts to their 12 person team.

Image credit: Diffbot/ screenshot

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