Addvocate-Trapit combines Trapit’s AI-driven content discovery technology, originally spun out of SRI International, with Addvocate’s employee advocacy and social promotion tools to form a single content-marketing platform. The combined product is intended to find highly relevant, topic-based content across the web and enable companies to promote that content through coordinated employee sharing. Leadership is led by Trapit co-founder and CEO Gary Griffiths, with Trapit co-founder Hank Nothhaft remaining as chief product officer; Addvocate co-founder Marcus Nelson left earlier in the year. The companies merged after an introduction from investor Rogers Venture Partners, which also led the announced funding. The combined company announced a $10 million Series B and retained a team of about 40 people while it integrates products. The firm has postponed choosing a more streamlined name until product integration is complete. Trapit provides a personalized content discovery application for brands, publishers and individuals to discover, engage, share and publish their stories. Its recommendation engine uses AI technology developed for DARPA to deliver relevant recommendations based on contextual analysis and user preferences. The company was founded in January 2010 by Gary Griffiths (CEO) and Hank Nothhaft (Chief Product Officer). Trapit is based in Palo Alto, California, and also has offices in Portland. According to the article it has a total of 24 employees. The company has previously raised financing, including a $6.2M Series A in 2012, and most recently raised additional funding via an SEC filing. Trapit uses the same artificial-intelligence technology as Apple’s Siri to recommend content aggregated from roughly 120,000 sources via its web and iPad apps. The company positions itself as a platform to power a broad range of content-recommendation applications beyond news, including publisher distribution and enterprise content monitoring. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Hank Nothhaft says Trapit will work initially with a limited group of partners to refine integrations and documentation. Trapit has extended its technology into video and plans to incorporate video recommendations into its own apps and partner products. The company expects to eventually offer an open SDK so third-party developers can build on its platform. Nothhaft says the Astro partnership puts Trapit “on the path to profitability,” and the startup is considering options that could let it avoid running advertising in its apps. Trapit, built from the same DARPA/SRI AI project that produced Siri, provides personalized web search and discovery using a crawler that indexes hundreds of thousands of sites and an engine that finds content matching users' "traps." The service lets users subscribe to topics rather than site feeds and improves recommendations through user feedback; traps are unique to each user. Trapit delivers over 4 million articles per day and has seen more than 2.5 million users since launch. With the new funding the company plans to grow its development team, continue app development and core R&D, and expand to mobile and tablet platforms. The company’s leadership includes co-founder and CEO Gary Griffiths and co-founder and chief product officer Henry Nothhaft Jr.; its board also includes SRI’s Steve Ciesinski and Frank Meehan of Horizons Ventures. Rob Majteles will join as an outside, non-investing director.

Total raised

$19M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Dec 2014