Realtime search startup Topsy Labs has raised $15 million in Series C funding today from BlueRun Ventures, Western Technology Investments, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister. This brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.
Topsy indexes and ranks search results based the conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried. What differentiates Topsy is that it focuses slightly more on data from Twitter and also holds on to data forever and results are powered by influencers tweeting about content within the social web. Topsy also says that its fast indexing technology is capable of processing over 1 million documents per second, which makes it well-suited for realtime search.
Topsy also powers realtime search for a number of media properties, including IDG Media, The Huffington Post and Discovery Communications. And Topsy has also started rolling out tools for marketers and publishers to leverage the social web, including social search widgets for publisher sites and analytics, which allows you to identify and quantify what keywords, terms and URLs are trending within the social web.
The startup is one of the remaining independent realtime search portals that is still in operation. OneRiot shut down its realtime search site and platform and actually transitioned all of its partners over to Topsy. Collecta also shut down its realtime search product earlier this year.
While other startups in the space are shifting focus, Topsy says it is thriving because of its technical advantage. In January, the startup served 500 million search queries (mostly through its API).
Topsy is still evaluating how to make revenue from the realtime search model, but is looking at ways to license its API. The new funding will be used to scale Topsy’s infrastructure and to hire more engineers and staff.