| Series A, 4/05 Clearstone Venture Partners Leapfrog Ventures |
Vast, a company in development since 2001, is a vertical search platform focused on autos, vacation rentals, and real estate. What is special about this company is that it digs deep into the web to give its users access to the very end of the product long tail. With over 4 million cars, 2 million vacation rentals, and 4 million homes for sale, Vast’s goal is to find any ad relevant to your search terms. Vast does not manually insert listings, source sites or filter their data, thus the Vast team created a filtering system to get rid of the 50% spam/duplicate ads their engine found. The plus side to having a completely automated system is that sites can be indexed faster and the smaller sites can be found by machine and not human eyes. Still the best way to get a single posting on Vast is to post it to a classifieds site such as myrealpost.com, postlets.com, and vflyer.com. Vast allows third parties to use its large index through an API, although the company mostly works with large publishers. Direct competitors include oodle, Google Base, kijiji and Craigslist overlapping with Vast in different areas.
In January 2008, Vast acquired Adaptive Real Estate Services (ARES), a company which hosts websites for real estate agents and brokers.
| Website | vast.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | April 1, 2005 |
| Tags | classifieds |
Hitting the very end of the long tail, Vast can even index baby monkeys for sale. Vast covers these classifieds categories: Cars, real estate, rentals, vacation rentals, jobs, merchandise, tickets, pets, horses and services.
