ChaCha has raised $30 million in Series C funding, mostly from the same companies that provided $14 million during the last funding round in November. Investors include Morton Meyerson, Bezos Expeditions, Rod Canion and Jack Gill.
ChaCha is a “human powered” search engine. Users send a question to ChaCha through text or voice call. That question will be forwarded to an “expert”, and an answer will be sent by text within a few minutes. Despite initial worries about scalability, ChaCha has reported that it signed more than one million users last September and has answered 27 million questions since it’s launch at the start of 2008.
What we think?
Wow… Q&A style search engines are doing really well. ChaCha isn’t the only one to send good news recently. 4INFO confirmed $20 million in funding last week, and Texperts were acquired in a huge purchase from 118 118. It’s starting to look like SMS answer is the key to mobile search. Doing imprecise, difficult browser searches over the mobile web might be losing out to services that provide tailored answers. Is this because it’s text based? SMS might not be some magic wand, but SMS answer searches are looking fairly recession proof.
I thought they’d only got $11 million?
Oh dear… things got a bit confusing while I was writing this article. When I started, it was about ChaCha getting 11 out of the 30 million in funding they had been looking for. During the time I was researching the article, ChaCha released updates to various news sites saying that they had completed the funding round and now had all 30 million. So far as I can figure out, it worked like this:
1st - ChaCha started a Series C funding round for 30 million.
2nd – It was made public that they had gotten 11 of that.
3rd – Various sites published the 11 million figure.
4th – ChaCha finished the funding round, got all 30 million, and sent people updates.
Hope that clears it up!
