Quintura Search Engine Draws the Next Round of a Few Million Funding

A semantic search engine Quintura has announced today that they have drawn “several million dollars” of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, a European investor specializing in financing early-stage startups (it was the one to discover and fund Skype, for example).

This is not the first investment in Quintura for Mangrove - it was also the one behind Quintura’s seed funding in November 2006 as well as behind the series A round in June 2007.

The funding arrives as a part of the next funding round. Unfortunately, the exact amount is not disclosed by Quintura but I believe any investment over 1 million is definitely worth mentioning anyway. Last summer the amount was not disclosed either and was also quoted as “several million”.

This round is intended to help Quintura scale its search platform as well as promote its search widget along with affiliate program for web publishers: Quintura plans include growth of monthly audience for Quintura Site Search service from its current 8 million to 50 million people over the next year.

The site search is basically a widget that provides visitors with a more aesthetically appealing way to search a site’s content and produces the results as a tag cloud while publishers are offered an additional opportunity to monetize those search queries performed on their sites and increase the number of page views generated by visitors. The widget is currently used by a number of large sites both in Russia (for example, cosmo.ru - a web property for the hugely popular here Cosmopolitan magazine) and internationally with ReadWriteWeb as the best known example in the technology community.

While I am a little biased since Quintura is a Russian startup, I still think that the achievement announced today is a well-deserved one and hopefully will help enhance Quintura search platform even further as well as bring new important publishers to their network.