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Factual, Inc. Secures $25 Million in Financing


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Factual, Inc., a collaborative data platform and web service, today announced it has secured $25 million in its first round of financing. The financing was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, with participation from Michael Ovitz and SV Angel fund founded by Ron Conway. Ben Horowitz and Danny Rimer, from Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures respectively, will join the Factual board of directors. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate its rate of growth, expand its data offerings and services, and hire top quality talent.

“This first round of funding represents an important milestone for Factual, capping off what’s been an exhilarating year for our company. It’s a testament to the hard work we’ve put in thus far, and the demonstrated power of our technology,” said Gil Elbaz, CEO/Founder of Factual, Inc. “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 (and the world) as we know it.”

Factual offers a platform for developers and publishers to create innovative applications by accessing data through various APIs. Factual hosts hundreds of thousands of datasets across multiple categories, but has recently focused its efforts on building its local data repository. In September, the company launched local datasets for more than 14 million US businesses, and for millions of businesses in Australia, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. Factual has also signed partnership deals with Home Junction and Booyah, and is delivering local data for Facebook® Places.

“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,” said Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. “With Gil’s proven success as an entrepreneur and visionary we believe he will build Factual into an important company.”

“We are thrilled to work with Gil. He is an entrepreneur who has built landmark infrastructure for the web we enjoy every day,” said Danny Rimer of Index Ventures. “In Factual, we believe he and his team have the ability to build an even more fundamental platform, making it easier for developers large and small to create the next generation of services that will live on this new web of data"

Factual offers access to its data platform for a nominal fee based on usage and data contributions. Developers and publishers who crowdsource and send high quality writes back to Factual will get fees reduced or eliminated. Factual’s goal is to create incentives for contributing back to the data ecosystem – similar to contributing back to the code base of an open source project.

Earlier this year, Factual secured $2 million in angel funding. For a complete list of investors, go to http://www.factual.com/about.



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