Diffbot, a California-based startup that helps identify and organize unstructured data across the Web though through computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence recently got financial backing. The venture fund behind Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta, recently invested $500,000 Diffbot to help expand the company’s technology. Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and Boingo Wireless, and Andy Bechtolsheim, the first major investor in Google are also financial backers.
Diffbot is a semantic search company that rivals Google’s Knowledge Graph and underpins Bing. The company PR rep, Kevin Brown says its database now spans about 600 million objects, adding 5 to 15 million new objects per day. For comparison, the Knowledge Graph has one billion objects.
Here’s how it works: Diffbot scans the internet for essentially everything on the web. It then creates an “object” for each webpage indexed. The objects provide a structured data set to be programmatically reused by a query engine. This process is entirely automated, hence it is said to be able to index in scale.
James Cham, Partner at Bloomberg Beta said:
It makes understanding the web as easy as understanding a structured database. Mike has put together an amazing team to tackle one of the fundamental challenges holding back the Web. It changes the way analysts and business.
Diffbot’s CEO says the company is an early stage AI startup, so scale will follow suit. Once unleashed to the masses, Diffbot will bring better semantic understanding to the Internet, once again shifting the game for SEO.
The company’s current clients include Cisco, Samsung, StumbleUpon, eBay, and CBS Interactive.
