Technology Veterans Invest $2 Million in Diffbot Visual Robot

SAN FRANCISCO-- Diffbot, creators of visual learning robot technology that lets developers analyze, extract, and enhance Web content, has secured a $2 million investment from technology veterans, including Sky Dayton, founder of EarthLink; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab; Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of YouSendIt, and other top executives and founders from Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo, with participation from Matrix Partners.

“Our goal with Diffbot is to understand every corner of the Web, and make every bit of it accessible for developers trying to create new, rich applications and experiences”

Diffbot is a new form of visual-based content extraction technology that views and understands Web content the same way human beings do. The technology identifies and extracts the important objects on any Web page using artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing. Diffbot’s APIs give application developers a way to instantly utilize data from any Web page in their own applications, effectively turning the entire Web into a usable database. Diffbot is now processing 100 million API calls per month on behalf of its customers, who are using it for Web site mobilization, content management system migration, tag generation, article grouping/clustering and a host of other functions.

“Diffbot is an incredibly sophisticated tool for developers to rapidly build compelling applications around Web content,” said Sky Dayton, founder of EarthLink and Boingo, and investor in Diffbot. “The more developers use Diffbot, the more it learns about and adds structure to data on the Web. This technology is becoming the basis for a new kind of Web experience enhanced by machine interpretation of content.”

Diffbot has categorized the Web into approximately 20 different page types that can be visually analyzed using layout and contextual cues, including everything from product and review pages to social networking profiles and recipes. This visual-based processing allows Diffbot to instantly understand and extract the content on any page, in any language. To date the company has released developer APIs for two of the most commonly consumed page types, Front Pages and Articles. The Front Page API is designed for analyzing home and index pages using common layout markers (headlines, bylines, images, articles, ads and more), while the Article API is used to extract clean article text, related images and videos and generate unique cross-referenced tags from news and blog Web pages.

“Our goal with Diffbot is to understand every corner of the Web, and make every bit of it accessible for developers trying to create new, rich applications and experiences,” said Michael Tung, Diffbot Founder and CEO. “This investment from such a prestigious group of technologists lets us accelerate towards that goal with new hires and expanded resources.”

Mr. Tung continued to say: “More than that, we’re receiving a huge vote of confidence from veterans who have built massive companies and understand the fine points of building for scale, maintaining maximum uptime and delivering the absolute highest standards of service. These are some of the best advisors in the industry to help bring our disruptive technology to every developer in the world, whether they are working at a Fortune 500 company or building the next one out of their garage.”

About Diffbot:

Diffbot looks at Web content with a human set of eyes. It is a robot that examines the Web using artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing, and provides software developers with tools to find, extract and understand objects from any Web page for use in their applications. Thousands of developers use Diffbot APIs to create consumer-friendly applications that use visual interpretation of the Web to re-imagine search, mobile web and hundreds of other consumer applications. Diffbot is based in Palo Alto, CA.

To learn more visit www.diffbot.com