Locu develops a system that combines machine learning with trained crowdworkers to convert messy, distributed data into structured formats. Its first vertical focus is local business information, specifically restaurant menu data, with plans to expand to other business price lists and later to domains like patents and healthcare. The company trains skilled crowdworkers in a proprietary markup language to correct and map data that automation cannot fully resolve; thousands have been trained and a few hundred are active at a time. Locu was launched out of Sir Tim Berners‑Lee’s lab at MIT and has been operating with a small team of thirteen in Cambridge while opening an office in San Francisco. The startup already has some early customers, including large companies and a few startups (names undisclosed). It will use new funding for product development and hiring as it expands its database and enterprise offerings. Locu’s core product is MenuPlatform.com, a soon-to-launch menu-management system that lets restaurant owners put menus online in under five minutes and edit them in real time via web and mobile. The platform supports automatic import from any file format, integration with Facebook and other sites, semantic annotation of menu data, and developer-facing APIs. Locu aims to create the world’s largest real-time, structured repository of small-business offerings so search and apps can query detailed items and prices. The company uses a combination of document analysis, machine learning and online human-computation workflows to digitize real-world content; menus are the initial focus. Founders and early team members are MIT alumni and researchers who won the MIT Linked Data Ventures competition and have expanded the engineering team while continuing to hire. Financially, Locu closed a seed round of $623,000 to fund these product and data initiatives.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Apr 2012