VentureBeat

WooMe, a video speed-dating site whose claim to fame is a speedy, no-frills interface and the ability to attract people who would never touch a traditional dating site (it calls itself an “introductions platform”), has raised a fresh round of capital to continue expanding.

NewTeeVee had the scoop on the funding news, however its report said the company was valued at $30 million after the money, and had a deal with MTV, both of which WooMe representative called “inaccurate”. WooMe says its post-valuation is significantly higher, at $41 million, and that there’s no deal at all with MTV.

By all appearances, WooMe has been growing rapidly. Three months after the site launched, co-founder Stephen Stokols told me that the site was running about 1,000 video sessions between users (read our past coverage for more on how WooMe works). Today, the company is claiming 15,000 sessions each day, with 350,000 registered users. It also says the average amount of time active users spend on the site is doubling each month.

One does get the impression, though, that WooMe hasn’t grown quite as quickly as its founders hoped. One whisper I’ve heard is that WooMe attracts new users easily, but has had trouble user retention, despite some high-profile media appearances, including the BBC and Fox’s Morning Show.

An ongoing “bridge round” that saw its initial funding extended to $7.5 million from $1.9 million may have indicated the site had trouble convincing investors it’s really rocket-fueled (bridge rounds are sometimes made on less favorable terms, though we don’t know the details here). But this is just speculation on my part. With the significant valuation of this round, it appears that any worries have probably been set aside, for now. [update: Stokols says the bridge round raised in December was actually done because the numbers were well beyond what was expected.]

The $12.5 million round was led by Index Ventures, with existing investors Atomico and Mangrove Capital Partners participating. The round has also been left open, with about $500,000 left to raise for “strategic angels” who may come in. WooMe has its offices split between San Francisco, Los Angeles and London.

If you had a minute to speak with someone over a live video connection, could you decide whether you would date them? That’s the question for WooMe, a startup aiming to bring the world of speed dating online.

It launches a testing version today, but will open for all in a couple of months.

Unlike most other dating sites, users don’t have to answer dozens of questions or fill out an application form. Nor will they be forced to go through the grueling process of reading other user’s rambling essays.

Instead, speed dating sessions with up to 16 participants, eight of each sex, will be the way WooMe users gauge their interest. The sessions are intended to run in live audio-video, although only audio can be selected; participants never type to one another, although they can classify them with tags for future reference. The founders say hearing a prospective date’s voice is far more revealing than often realized.

No other dating startup we know of has based their company on speed dating. WooMe’s gamble is based partly on the lack of speed dating online, partly on the failure of other models of online dating, despite the sizable rewards awaiting successful companies. (The company says the market could reach $10 billion, but that’s clearly a stretch).

The years since the dotcom bust have seen dozens of dating startups appear and disappear; Match.com, once considered a thriving dating community, lacks hipness. Some sites like eHarmony, typically catering to older individuals, are somewhat successful. But no company has yet claimed the holy grail: Online dating that everyone uses.

On the other hand, this technology isn’t particularly defensible. There’s nothing stopping a more popular brand (Match.com) from duplicating it; except, that is, economics.

WooMe is dirt cheap. After a conversation, a guy (more often) can say that he likes a girl. If the girl says she likes him too, the guy can pay $1 to get the girl’s contact details. There’s no way Match.com will want to match this low price.

The site is not monetizing through ads, another refreshing difference from some of the more recent dating sites.

Like another recent startup, iminlikewithyou, WooMe aims to satisfy the short attention span of the younger generation. The focus is on fun, fast interactions. Unlike iminlikewithyou, WooMe thinks its service can result in real dates for its members, because it will give a much better view of who the other person really is, despite the speed of sessions.As a demo of his service, WooMe CEO Stephen Stokols showed me how users could start speed-dating sessions based on themes of their own devising; his example was called “The Faces of TechCrunch.” WooMe is present at the TechCrunch40 conference today, undergoing their alpha launch for an initial user base of 1000.

Facebook users can invite each other to Woome sessions.

One problem haunting dating sites, and which may also challenge this one: Not enough desirable women, and a glut of socially challenged men.

The WooMe team believes that their service will provide just enough depth of interaction to help desirable women (and, to be fair, men) quickly weed out the people they don’t want. The hosts of sessions will also be able to be selective as to who enters.

The platform offers possibilities beyond dating, as well. Sokols mentioned interviews for jobs or potential roommates as good uses for WooMe.

WooMe has taken on $1.9 million in funding from investors including Joost founder Niklas Zennström, through his Atomico investment fund.

Jott, the convenient voice-to-text service we reviewed favorably in March, has raised $5.4 million in its latest round of financing.

Jott, of Seattle, allows you to call a number, record a message, and then have that message translated into text and e-mailed to you or one of your contacts.

Bain Capital of Boston led the round with money from its new early-stage fund. The round included previous investors Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners and Atomico.

Founder and chief executive John Pollard won’t disclose numbers of users, but says response has been strong without a penny spent on marketing. People are using Jott to manage soccer teams, communicate with their families, and to send themselves book or movie ideas they’ve schemed up and don’t want to forget, he says.

Jott is still free, and doesn’t plan to be otherwise for at least the next few months, after which it will consider using advertising or an ad-free premium service to bring in cash. Among other reasons we detailed in our earlier post, this makes it more appealing than its competitors SimulScribe and Spinvox.

The eye-opening performances claimed by new behavioral advertising start-ups Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop are sure to grab the attention from online retailers and publishers.

Take the little announcement by the nine-month-old Menlo Park company Aggregate Knowledge yesterday at DEMO: It drove more than 20 percent of all of the holiday purchases at major discount retail site Overstock.com. Considering that the annual revenue of Overstock is in the range of $700-800 million, our rough estimate is that Aggregate Knowledge pushed at least $100 million in sales. Aggregate Knowledge wouldn’t comment, but if we’re right, this is downright impressive, considering Overstock is just one customer. AK gets paid for boosting sales (we don’t know exactly how much). We do know that it was making millions even before the holiday period (see our earlier coverage).

The easiest way to understand Aggregate Knowledge is that it takes Amazon.com’s feature, “People who bought this book, also bought these books,” and applies it across the Web. For example, if you are browsing at a retail site, and looking at a particular gift basket for Valentine’s, AK proposes other gift baskets that others like you have ended up buying. It does this for news articles, and even advertisements.

No wonder Aggregate Knowledge is getting competition. Germany’s Wunderloop has been working steadily on a similar technology since 1999, but had stayed small and conservative through the downturn between 2001 and 2003. But now, with online retail flourishing, it is going for the big-time too. It has just raised cash from Klaus Hommels, of Benchmark Europe, Howard Hartenbaum, an early investor at Skype with Draper Richards, Skype founder Ziklas Zennstrom’s investment group, Atomico, and the European Founders Fund.

Hommels told VentureBeat last week the investment was in the “single digit” millions. That’s comparable to the $5.5 million invested in AK by Kleiner Perkins and others.

Hommels says Wunderloop has the most advanced behavioral technology in Europe. Like AK, Wunderloop assesses the clicks you make in real-time, making judgments about your tastes, without ever knowing who you are. Then it lets a travel insurance advertiser, for example, target the user profile that Wunderloop has determined to be at least 25 percent interested in finance, and 25 percent interested in travel. It can deliver ads, videos or content, dependent on the user’s tastes. The price of the average shopping basket bought by customers at Web sites using Wunderloop is 48 percent higher than without Wunderloop, Hommels said. Wunderloop serves several large European customers, including AOL, T-Online, Tiscali, Lycos and Freenet. Wunderloop has closed 100 percent of the customers it has started negotiating with, Hommels said. The new chief executive has revamped the Wunderloop management team, he said. It has about 30 employees.