China-based internet conglomerate Tencent co-led a $10m series A round for US-based web data gathering tool Diffbot yesterday.
Felicis Ventures co-led the round, which included fellow venture capital firms Amplify Ventures and Valor Capital, as well as angel investors Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Lee and Georges Harik.
The funding will allow Diffbot to build a robot that scrapes the web’s mass of unstructured data, structuring it within its Global Index database, which it claims surpasses the size of Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Global Index uses deep learning, computer vision and natural language processing to power applications for clients such as Cisco, Adobe and Microsoft. To date, the database contains more than 1.2 billion objects and is adding roughly 10 million every day, according to Diffbot.
Bloomberg Beta, the early-stage investment subsidiary of media group Bloomberg, invested an undisclosed sum in Diffbot in June 2015.
The company had already raised $2m in a 2012 angel round featuring VC firm Matrix Partners and angel investors Andy Bechtolsheim, Sky Dayton, Joi Ito, Brad Garlinghouse, Maynard Webb, Elad Gil, Jonathan Heiliger, Aaron Lee and Montgomery Kersten.