TechCrunch: Mor Naaman’s Seen.co Secures $1.25M in Seed Funding

Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute associate professor Mor Naaman doesn’t just lead the Institute’s Connective Media program — he’s a social media researcher and entrepreneur, and the start-up he co-founded, Seen.co, just secured $1.25 million in seed funding.

The investment in Seen.co, a new way to organize the real-time web, is evenly split between Horizons Ventures and KEC Ventures. Horizons Ventures manages the private investment of Li Ka-shing. Profits generated from Horizons’ investments contribute to Ka-shing’s charity foundation that also donated $130 million to the Technion last year.

Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures said, “Social media has restructured how information is disseminated, how content is consumed and even how history and events have played out. Structuring real-time stories algorithmically is a tremendous business opportunity. We are excited to see the impact the team at Seen.co will create; filtering and ranking this sea of content with speed and precision will become an extraordinary tool to both consumers and marketers.”

Mor Naaman added, “It is very exciting to use the core research and ideas we have been developing in academic settings since 2008 and apply them in a real-world, large scale system. Seen builds on this core tech to solve a real need in the market: to allow consumers (and others) to see and understand what’s happening, based on real time data and social media.”

Seen.co is a graduate of The New York Times Company’s timeSpace accelerator, with angel investors including David Tisch’s BoxGroup, Scott and Cyan Banister, Matt Rolandson and Sam Tripodi, Andrew Rasiej, Cantora Records, and Thatcher Bell, Venture Partner at Gotham Ventures (and Cornell Tech’s Investor-in-Residence).

Seen.co’s mission is to help people understand and connect deeply with the world’s myriad stories. The funding will be used to cover more stories, expand the technology team and bring Seen’s superior product (which builds on two patents, eight research papers and three Google Research Awards) to more communities in the $200 billion live events market. Naaman co-founded Seen.co with Tarikh Korula.

Read more about the funding on Seen.co and in TechCrunch.