Reuters – Scoop.it Raises Funds

Scoop.it has secured $2.6 million in funding according to VentureBeat, writes Reuters. The company combines semantic analysis with human curation to help brands publish relevant content. Partech International, Elaia Partners, IXO Private Equity and Orkos Capital contributed to this round. The company has also hired Andrew Federici as vice president of monetization, writes VentureBeat.

Reuters – Scoop.it has scooped up $2.6 million to mold vast amounts of Internet content into more manageable form.

The company combines semantic analysis with human curation to help brands publish relevant content. Its technology crawls 10 million pages across the Web, analyzes it, and makes personalized content suggestions for users based on their areas of interest. Users pick and choose the items they find interesting or relevant and publish them to their personal or organizational site.

“A growing number of people, professionals, businesses and brands have to publish online to develop their visibility, reputation, and brand,” said founder Guillaume Decugis in an interview with VentureBeat. “This is time-consuming, and it is hard to produce relevant quality content to rise above the noise. We help them find content that relates to their areas of expertise so they can feed their sites, social media channels, search engines, and newsletters.”

Decugis offered the example of an architect who uses Scoop.it to find and post content that relates to her specific area of expertise — sustainable architecture. She uses the engine to publish a daily update of current technologies, case studies, events, projects, and design strategies, such as a green rooftop on an art museum in Seoul or an initiative to promote solar homes in the desert. Organizations like the University of California, San Francisco are also using Scoop.it to curate content generated by or about their faculty, students, and community.

Scoop.it’s combination of aggregation, analytics, and curation is what Decugis said distinguishes it from the many competitors, including Snip.it, Rebelmouse, Paper.li and even Flipboard. He said brands are in control of what gets published using Scoop.it and the publishing process is integrated into their workflow. The platform includes features for social sharing and analytics so every “scoop” is measured.

“We became obsessed with how to discover content,” Decugis said. “Information overload is a problem and we have a big vision to organize the web, starting with helping people to publish better, more meaningfully, and in a more rewarding way.”

More than 75 million people have visited Scoop.it since it launched in 2011, pivoting from a mobile content-discovery product called Goojet. Scoop.it now sells premium plans that include extra features for lead generation, customization, and analytics. Partech International (which is an investor in VentureBeat) , Elaia Partners, IXO Private Equity, and Orkos Capital contributed to this round. Goojet and Scoop.it have cumulatively raised $13.6 million. The company also announced that it has hired Andrew Federici as vice president of monetization. Federici previously worked at Hightail/YouSendIt.

Scoop.it has headquarters in San Francisco with an office in Toulouse, France. It has 16 employees.