Grokr offers a predictive, Google Now–style search and personalized news app for iOS that proactively surfaces weather, traffic, sports, trending headlines, and local recommendations. It ingests signals from users' social profiles on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and combines them with location, time of day, interests and intent to personalize alerts and results. The company built a knowledge graph on top of Freebase and augmented it with 50–75 additional data sources, aggregating roughly 700 million facts and 25 million entities, and uses machine-learning algorithms to rank entities. External data sources cited include Yelp, Factual and Rovi among others. Grokr is keeping notifications limited for now but is exploring integrations with services such as calendar and email while deliberately excluding contacts for privacy reasons. The Sunnyvale-based startup is backed by $4.2 million in funding from NEA, U.S. Ventures, Triple Point and Lerer Ventures. Grokr is a newly formed startup that, per its placeholder website, aims to “unleash the cognitive Web for a post-PC world.” The company has not publicly described a specific product or service beyond that tagline, and TechCrunch noted there is “absolutely no telling what Grokr is going to be all about.” An SEC filing shows founder Srivats Sampath has raised $1.5 million for Grokr. The filing and article do not disclose the financing instrument or any participating investors. Sampath is an Executive-in-Residence at U.S. Venture Partners and a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Mercora, previously founded and led McAfee.com, and was a vice president at Netscape. Grokr is poised for launch later this month, with further details expected at that time.

Total raised

$6M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Dec 2012