Desciclopedia, Qwiki Snags $8 Million In Venture Funding

Desciclopedia, Qwiki  Snags $8 Million In Venture Funding
Investors Include Founders of Facebook, YouTube and Leading Early-Stage Venture Capital Firms.
Qwiki, a startup pioneering the transformation of data into rich-media narratives, today announced an accumulated series A funding round of $8 million, with a total of $9.5 million worth of funds, taking into account its angel fund.
The round was led by a number of prominent individual investors including Eduardo Saverin (co-founder, Facebook), Jawed Karim (co-founder, YouTube) and Pradeep Sindhu (co-founder, Juniper Networks), as well as institutional investors Lerer Media Ventures, Tugboat Ventures and Contour Venture Partners. Saverin and Pejman will join Qwiki’s Board of Directors.
The new funding will fuel Qwiki’s technology development, which will be followed by a public launch on various platforms. The success of Qwiki’s invite-only private Alpha of its reference products, which has signed up hundreds of thousands of users, is good cause for the latest funding round.
Eduardo Saverin is more prominently known as one of the co-founders of Facebook, with whom Mark Zuckerberg has had some heavy legal battles. He was the former Chief Financial officer of the social media giant and lost much of his shares due to som interesting technicalities. This phase of Facebook’s history was accounted in the controversial Hollywood movie, “The Social Network”. Also, a review by one of our writers, Kit Dotson, says that Eduardo Saverin is actually a lot less entertaining than was portrayed by Andrew Garfield in the movie. And here’s another one  from Arthur Lindsey about the movie itself.
A “Qwiki” is a short, interactive story: a drastically improved information experience provided via interactive video. Unlike traditional rich media content, all Qwikis are created on the fly from web sources (without any human intervention). … Learn More