Philly Tech News VentureWatch: 10/28/2011: DuckDuckGo, Quewey, Quiq and more
Tom Paine
The amount of funding for Gabriel Weinberg's search engine DuckDuckGo was $3 million, according to an SEC filing. The main investor was prominent New York-based VC Union Square Ventures, joined by several individual investors. DuckDuckGo has only a miniscule sliver of the overall search market, but its different model-not algorithm driven, no user tracking-has gained some traction. Union Square Ventures' Brad Burnham wrote in a blog post: "We invested in DuckDuckGo because we became convinced that it was not only possible to change the basis of competition in search, it was time to do it". Weinberg, who said he held off on taking funding as long as possible, will use the funds to finally hire some other employees and expand infrastructure.
Unirisx, the Conshohocken-based provider of a SaaS platform for the Insurance industry, recently raised another $1 million in debt-based financing, in addition to $1.4 million in debt-based financing it raised earlier this year, according to an SEC filing. Investors raised $7 million in equity in 2009 to acquire the company. Past investors have included Jaguar Capital Partners, Permit Capital LLC and MIM Capital. The highly respected former Harleysville Group CIO Akhil Tripathi is CEO, and Zurich Financial Services is a major client. Unirisx started as a spinoff from Unisys' British subsidiary.
Quewey, a Philadelphia-based business oriented Q&A site, has apparently raised $250,000, according to a filing hot off the press. They haven't launched in Beta yet, but you can see their blog here.
Blue Bell-based Quiq, Inc., which provides a system enabling perscriptions to be dispensed directly to patients in a physician's office, has raised over $2 million, according to SEC filings shown by FormDs.com.
OpenDesks' (Conshohocken) recently released iPhone app for locating temporary work spaces in 133 cities around the country got a nice mention in the New York Times (at the bottom of the article) .
The New Jersey Technology Council has named mVisum a finalist for its Early-Stage Company of the Year Award, the Cherry Hill Courier-Post reports. mVisum, which is based in the Rutgers-Camden Technology Campus, allows medical professionals to securely receive, review, and respond to patient data recorded at the point of care.
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