| Closed Date | 9/10 |
| Closed URL | techcrunch.com/20... |
| TOTAL | $33M |
| FUNDING TOTAL | $33M |
| Series A, 3/07 Greylock Partners Tugboat Ventures | $8M |
| Series B, 4/08 Greylock Partners Madrone Capital Partners Tugboat Ventures | $25M |
Cuil was a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuil has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuil is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.
Cuil was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts. Costello was the founder of Xift.
Cuil met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and an office in Menlo Park.
| Website | cuil.com/twiceler/robot.html |
Twiceler is Cuil’s web crawler.
