Philly-based business Q&A site Quewey launches in private beta
Tom Paine
Philadelphia-based Quewey, a business-oriented Q&A site, has launched in private beta. Invitations are available to the first 1,000 qualified users who sign up at www.quewey.com
Quewey 's starting point, and a key difference from other Q&A sites, is that it uses the LinkedIn API to ensure the professional standing of its contributors. Queway also recently acquired Zebek, a startup that describes its core competency as "advanced virtual-graph based search and matching". Zebek's technology will be the engine behind Quewey's back-end development, matching the people asking questions to the most relevant experts and providing algorithms ranking trending topics and thought leaders among users. Zebek's co-founder and CTO, Anshu Aggarwal, has joined Quewey as CTO.
Quewey's founder is Matthew Safaii (right), a Wharton MBA who serves as Managing Director at ICG, working mostly on the acquisitions side. Safaii will remain at ICG so he will not be running the company on a day-to-day basis, but will be a "very actively involved non-executive founder", he said in a phone interview with Philly Tech News. Someone else will be brought on as CEO. To be clear, ICG is not an investor in Quewey. The company has raised $300,00 in funding to date, mostly from angel investors, and has an open filing to raise more if it needs to.
Queway's closest competitors who come to mind are Quora and Joel Spolsky's Stack Exchange , which started out being programming-specific but has since expanded to covering numerous subjects. Quewey is different, though, in significant ways. One will be the ability of community members to monetize their expertise by offering one-on-one advice as followups when answer-seekers want more details, through a per minute charge. Safaii envisions Quewey's service as being much more acessable and affordable than a site like Gearson Lehman. Quewey says its Personal Consulting Platform will manage the entire consulting work flow, from lead generation and scheduling, to call logistics, payment processing and client review.
Quora was reported last month to be looking for a valuation in excess of $300 million in its next round. Fortune had a good recent article profiling major players in the Q & A market. And other new entrants are emerging.
Quewey has offices in the Rittenhouse Square area.
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