Investors including Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Ron Conway’s SV Angel have committed $25 million to Factual, a Los Angeles startup building an online collaborative data platform.
Factual was founded in 2007 by Gil Elbaz, whose earlier venture, Applied Semantics, created the AdSense platform that matches ads to content on Web pages. Applied Semantics was sold to Mountain View Internet company Google in 2003.
“Factual is a key player in the emerging data-as-a-service market, with the potential to fundamentally impact how people and businesses use data to make decisions,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz, who is joining Factual’s board of directors, said in a news release Thursday. “With Gil’s proven success as an entrepreneur and visionary, we believe he will build Factual into an important company.”
Other investors in the funding round include Index Ventures and Michael Ovitz, former chairman of Creative Artists Agency and former president of The Walt Disney Co. Danny Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, is joining Factual’s board.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its data offerings and “hire top-quality talent,” according to the news release. “With the new funding and support of our superstar team of investors, we can become a driving force in the open data revolution that’s transforming the Web,” said Elbaz, Factual’s CEO.
Factual received $2 million in angel funding earlier this year from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors.
Contact Frank Russell at 408-920-5876. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercspike.
