IBJNews

  • Home

ChaCha lands $3M investment

IBJ Staff
January 20, 2011
Keywords
ChaCha, Funding, Internet, Manufacturing & Technology, Private Companies, Search Engines, Technology
Back to TopCommentsE-mailPrint

Carmel-based ChaCha Search has closed a $3 million round of financing to further fund an expansion of its signature mobile service, the company said early Thursday.

The funding extends a $20 million investment made in October by VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho Ventures. Nearly a third of the latest round, $900,000, comes from new investor Qualcomm Ventures.

“We have tracked ChaCha closely since the beginning and have been impressed by its recent, accelerated growth,” Qualcomm Vice President Nagraj Kashyap said in a prepared statement.  

Since its inception in December 2005, ChaCha has raised about $75 million.

ChaCha, which bills itself as “the No. 1 free real-time answers service,” allows wireless phone users to call in or text their questions to the company’s human guides. ChaCha makes money by embedding advertisements in the answers.

The company said it has answered more than 1 billion questions in the past two years, reaching over 32 million unique users every month through its mobile platforms and website.

The company has about 70 employees in addition to 63,000-plus independent contractors who work as guides, earning 2 cents to 20 cents per task.

San Diego-based Qualcomm Ventures, a subsidiary of Qualcomm Inc., was launched in November 2000 to invest in privately owned startups in the wireless Internet markets.

VantagePoint, which has offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Hong Kong, funds “transformative companies” in the information technology, clean technology and heath care sectors.

Rho Ventures has offices in Palo Alto, Calif., New York and Montreal. It has experience in information technology, communications, new media, health care and energy technology.

ADVERTISEMENT

Post a comment to this story

COMMENTS POLICY
We reserve the right to remove any post that we feel is obscene, profane, vulgar, racist, sexually explicit, abusive, or hateful.
 
You are legally responsible for what you post and your anonymity is not guaranteed.
 
Posts that insult, defame, threaten, harass or abuse other readers or people mentioned in IBJ editorial content are also subject to removal. Please respect the privacy of individuals and refrain from posting personal information.
 
No solicitations, spamming or advertisements are allowed. Readers may post links to other informational websites that are relevant to the topic at hand, but please do not link to objectionable material.
 
We may remove messages that are unrelated to the topic, encourage illegal activity, use all capital letters or are unreadable.
 

Messages that are flagged by readers as objectionable will be reviewed and may or may not be removed. Please do not flag a post simply because you disagree with it.

ADVANCED SEARCH
Sponsored by
ADVERTISEMENT

facebook - twitter on Facebook & Twitter

Follow on TwitterFollow IBJ on Facebook:
Follow on TwitterFollow IBJ's Tweets on these topics:
 
Subscribe to IBJ

  1. Good ole' Obamacare. Thanks liberals and those who didn't bother to vote.

  2. Yes. Blame those who were too lazy to go vote Obama out and those who voted him in again. That's my take on it. I know folks won't get it on the left. OK. Start berating me now!

  3. Serioulsy, people are AGINST this project? Most communities would be salivating over a project like this. You'd rather have an empty eye-sore gas station and shacks posing as apartments? This project is exactly what BR needs. BUILD IT MR MAYOR. And yes, I am a BR resident, and have been for 20 years.

  4. As a St. Vincent employee of over 20 years, I am saddened and disheartened by this announcement. Unfortunately, as the healthcare "industry" continues on this political and corporate path, all that St. Vincent Hospital has stood for spiritually for its employees and this community is being sucked dry. I know it truly has no choice. It is not just Obamacare or just competition or just any single thing. This trend started long before I was even born when the government became involved in healthcare and it became an "industry." I grieve for those who will lose their jobs, one of whom may be me, but I also grieve for this hospital which I have served for over 20 years. May God give us and it the grace to withstand the future of healthcare.

  5. Why do people constantly harp on this issue and act ignorant about what a city population measures? A city's population is the city's population. There is no argument or debate about it. If you want to measure the density of a city--measure it. If you want to measure the size of a metropolitan area, then measure the metropolitan population. City boundaries cover different sized areas--and they always have (though the disparity has probably increased since about 1900 or so when more cities began annexing their surrounding communities). For example, San Francisco only covers 49 square miles while Houston cover nearly 600 square miles. No one argues about the population rankings of either city even though they clearly cover extremely different sized areas. Indianapolis is the 13 largest city by population in the U.S. That is a fact. While the population of a metropolitan area may give you a better sense of how large a community is, as noted, even metro areas can vary widely in the size of geographic area they cover--so that is not a perfect comparison either.

ADVERTISEMENT