Nara Brings in $3 Million in Funds Through “Series A-1” Round to Spruce up its Platform


By: Jeff Stewart  |   December 17th, 2012   |   Business, Living, News

Finding a good restaurant in a new city has always remained a tough challenge for travellers and holidaymakers. Even though people take help from online restaurant guides and search engines, they end up choosing a wrong venue because a the quality and quantity of the reviews are not reliable enough to offer you a can’t miss search experience.

 

To deal with this problem Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup, Nara has introduced a web search app that finds restaurants according to your taste with the help of an artificial intelligence feature that provides relevant information keeping the interest graph data of each user in mind.

 

This unique idea was warmly greeted by the investors when it was launched, resulting in Nara successfully securing $4 million in a Series A funding round back in June this year. Now five months after completing the first round of funding, Nara announced yesterday that they had raised another $3 million in the form of new financing. More importantly all these rounds were funded completely by Account Management LLC which has now helped this startup raised a capital of $7 million to this date within just one year.

 

Talking about this second round of funding, co-founder and CEO of Nara, Thomas Copeman told that “Call it a Series A-1. We had so much demand with our round this summer, and we’re seeing exciting new opportunities to invest in growth.”

 

Co-founding CTO Dr. Nathan Wilson said that, “We are now deploying massively parallel neural networks into the cloud to [automatically organize and personalize information] at Web scale and bring order to a growing number of categories.

 

According to Copeman, “Nara’s vision is to build a more personal, actionable and liberating Web”. Therefore, in future we may see Nara using the same inference to recommend hotels, music, books, movies and numerous other categories.

 

For the time being following its future plans the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup is now looking to announce partnership with GrubHub, an online mobile food ordering service that will complement its association with OpenTable and FourSquare. This new integration with GrubHub will be made available to the users of Nara by the end of this year.

 

These extensions in relationship and networks will help Nara a great deal in gathering more authentic description data and reviews of each spot, which this startup will then feed into its database in order to compare venues in various cities, price ranges and genres. In addition, to cater the demand that Copeman talked about, Nara has also increased its team of multiple professionals to 20 members now.

 

So it seems that Nara is well on its way to make it real big in the near future.

 

Source: Pandodaily

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