Diffbot, a developer of visual-based content extraction technology, has raised $2 million from a pool of investors that includes: EarthLink and Boingo founder Sky Dayton; Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder; Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab; Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of YouSendIt; and Matrix Partners.
Diffbot enables developers to analyze, extract and work with online content in a way that’s more like how humans would do it In other words, it interprets web page content into spreadsheet-friendly data.
It starts by visually ascertaining what a person would consider important, by first identifying things like headlines and photos. Then it blends this information with other information and crunches it all into a meaningful database using artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing.
Diffbot said it 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,” Dayton said. “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.”
Related links:
Diffbot – official site
Diffbot – press release
GigaOm – Silicon Valley stars pony up $2M to scale Diffbot’s visual learning robot
The Verge – Diffbot raises $2 million to help apps understand the open, unstructured web
