Silk offers a cloud-based, browser-native platform that lets non-technical “knowledge workers” turn messy datasets into interactive pages and visualizations. Since emerging from stealth in 2011, users have created roughly 300,000 interactive pages across about 16,000 people, with pages growing ~20% month over month. The company’s first paid product, Silk for Teams, targets enterprise groups and will be offered as SaaS alongside a free public service and a private tier free for up to three users. Planned enhancements include sharing sophisticated internal datasets with paying customers and adding payments to support paywalled content and other monetization. Silk is also shortening its domain to silk.co and operating with development in Amsterdam and sales in the U.S. Financially, the company has raised a total of $3.7M to date to support product development and U.S. expansion. Silk is a web-based personal database and content-crunching app that enables users to create and store structured information and then filter, visualize and manipulate it without editing code. The product supports visualizations such as Google Maps views and pie charts and allows public or private real-time sharing and long-term searchable storage. The company offers the app for free and highlights production use of Haskell. Silk has outlined monetization plans that begin with paid services like custom domains and templates, progress to a marketplace for templates and customizations, and eventually include a marketplace for data sets (competing with companies like InfoChimps). The company was founded in 2009 by Lon Boonen and CEO Salar Al-Khafaji. Silk offers a web-based platform that lets content creators provide their work in a more structured format so users can quickly find and interact with specific data. The service is currently in private alpha and was demonstrated using data abstracted from CrunchBase and Wikipedia. Silk aims to make it easier to interact with the growing amount of continuously published content by enabling structured distribution and search. The company will use its recent funding to bring the technology to market and to scale development efforts. Salar al Khafaji is the CEO who provided the demo shown to TechCrunch. Silk was founded in 2009 and is based in Amsterdam.

Total raised

$4M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Oct 2013