Zemanta began as a provider of editorial tools for bloggers that suggested related links during writing, and has shifted toward a content discovery network that recommends related content directly to readers. Its product lineup includes Streams — an endless stream of related articles for mobile pages — and Circles, networks of trusted sites that cross-promote content. The company’s business is currently split roughly 50/50 between editorial tools and the discovery network, and early adoption metrics show about 600,000 publishers in the network with mobile clickthroughs as high or higher than desktop. Zemanta is using sponsored content within recommendations as its primary monetization strategy as consumption moves to smartphones and tablets. Leadership has been reorganized to support this shift, with Todd Sawicki moving from president to CEO and co-founder Bostjan Spetic becoming chief product officer. Management says the company has significant revenue and does not need a large fundraising round at the moment. Zemanta provides bloggers with automated content recommendations, tips and promotional tools to help surface and distribute their posts. The company has partnerships with major blogging platforms WordPress and Blogger that helped drive recent growth. Zemanta reported 100,000 active users in the most recent month, a tenfold increase year‑over‑year, and delivers about 1 million recommendations daily. The startup says the new funding will be used to ramp up sales and marketing and build new and better products for bloggers. Zemanta won Seedcamp in 2007 and says it now expects to be able to reach profitability without the need for further capital. The company calls this its largest venture capital round to date. Zemanta provides an as‑you‑write contextual recommendation service and plugin that suggests stories, images, hyperlinks and tags to bloggers. The service supports over 10 blogging platforms and is available as a free plugin for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Live Writer, WordPress, Moveable Type and Drupal. As the user composes text, Zemanta processes it and offers relevant content and linking suggestions to simplify content creation. Fred Wilson of Union Square described the product as "adwords for content creators" and the company plans to open its recommendation engine to other web apps. The next release will add personalization features such as limiting suggestion pools to user sources, searching a user’s Flickr account and pointing Zemanta to a Twitter account to surface related blogs from friends. The company was founded by Boštjan Špetič and Andraž Tori, who are 25 years old. Financially, Zemanta has raised US$2.2 million to date from seed investors. Zemanta provides a web service API that analyzes blog text and suggests contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags for platforms like WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and Firefox. It uses an internally developed semantic analysis engine to build links to related stories and to add likely links into posts which bloggers can edit. Zemanta plans to integrate third-party tabs that provide vertical-specific suggestions such as tech or SEO. The product is in alpha and is described as a web service API similar to Akismet; the company notes the underlying technology is CPU/resource intensive and has historically been used in academic and enterprise systems. The team emerged out of Slovenia and participated in Seedcamp in London, where they were selected for funding. Financially, Zemanta announced a $1.5 million seed round led by Eden Ventures with additional investment from Saul and Robin Klein through The Accelerator Group, and they have brought in CEO Aleš Špetič.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2013