Vespa.ai, a startup that spun out of Yahoo last month, has raised $31 million in Series A funding from Blossom Capital.
This allows them to “store, sift through, and apply unlimited quantities of data for a number of uses,” said founder and CEO Jon Bratseth.
Use cases include “sifting through billions of documents to find a financial services institution” to “processing hundreds of thousands of queries per second to deliver personalized content and ads for Yahoo,” he added.
A key problem that many companies face is having the infrastructure to store extensive amounts of data, and accessing it efficiently. The startup’s cloud service and search platform can tap into this data in real time, giving companies responses or decisions almost immediately after a query has been put in. It also tailors any response according to the sector that the company operates in; for example, it can provide social media platforms with personalized content recommendations, or enable online retailers to deliver shopping suggestions.
“We’ve been doing it for twenty years, battle-tested by Fortune 500 companies,” said Bratseth. While the startup has been a part of Yahoo for two decades, it said that the decision to spin out was supported by Yahoo, which remains a key client.
Vespa.ai makes its money by providing its platform as an open-source tool to companies, including Spotify, Wix, and Vinted, among others. Its clients can subscribe to its full suite of services, and the startup is currently expanding its cloud offerings for its customers.
The Series A round was led by London-based venture capital firm Blossom Capital, which has previously backed the likes of Pigment, Moonpay, and Checkout.com.
With the cash injection, the startup will ramp up its engineering functions, as well as its cloud services.
Check out the 12-slide pitch deck used to secure the funding.
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