Cuill raises $10 million from Greylock — rumor
update
Cuill, a secretive search startup, has raised $10 million in funding from Greylock Partners, according to Techcrunch.
We wrote about Cuill this past February, when we heard the company was looking to close a venture round.
Its promise: The ability to crawl the web for information related to search queries — at one-tenth the cost of Google.
The Menlo Park, Calif. company is headed by search experts that have left Google and Stanford University.
Web services such as search engines are requiring larger and larger amounts of electricity, more powerful data centers and more bandwidth as more people go online. Google has had a laser focus not just on quality search results, but on this infrastructure required to operate it, as we’ve noted.
If Cuill (pronounced “cool”) proves to be as efficient as it claims, this could be a big technical advantage. The other challenge for Cuill is stealing attention from the now-established Google brand for search — the same problem that every other search startup has these days, no matter how good it is.
Update: David Sze, Greylock’s most active partner on Internet companies, said “Unfortunately, I cannot comment on this rumor,” suggesting to us that this deal may not be closed yet, but could be close., though we’ll let you divine what it means.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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