Diffbot Raises 10M To Expand AI Engine That Mines The Web Xconomy

Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources, announced today it raised 10 million from investors including Tencent and Felicis Ventures to expand its "knowledge-as-a-service" offerings to businesses and consumer apps. The Palo Alto, CA-based startup, founded in 2009, still has a tiny staff of 14. But Diffbot's ambition is huge: to catalog trillions of facts across the Web--many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can't be mined by traditional search engines. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion entities such as people, products, and places since the middle of last year. Its Global Index also encompasses 10 to 20 times that number of facts, says Diffbot founder and CEO Mike Tung.