Irish internet start-up touted as serious threat to Google
Wednesday April 16 2008
A start-up company founded by Louth man Tom Costello, which is being already being touted as a serious contender to Google, has received €25m in equity financing from an American private equity house.
Little is known of Cuill which has not yet formally launched but for the past number of months technology writers have been quietly suggesting that it may be the firm to take on Google, which is currently unrivalled in most parts of the world.
Cuill, which is based in Menlo Park, California, describes itself as a "stealth start-up".
It was founded by Mr Costello, a computer engineering graduate at Trinity College Dublin who received his PhD from Stanford University in the US. Mr Costello, who is now the chief executive of Cuill, previously worked for IBM where he specialised in search architecture.
He founded the company with his wife Anna Patterson, who is now Cuill's president. She previously worked for Google and is credited with building Recall, the largest search engine ever created, capable of indexing 12 billion pages.
The other co-founder is Russell Power who, like many of other Cuill employees is a Google graduate.
Investment
The €25m investment came from Madrone Capital Partners, a Menlo Park-based private equity firm associated with Rob Walton, the eldest son of Wal-mart founder Sam Walton.
Currently chairman of what is the world's largest retailer, Forbes last year estimated his wealth at $16.7bn.
The latest investment follows $8m in initial funding from private equity firms Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.
"We are pleased with the confidence of our investors," Mr Costello said in a statement yesterday. "Our team is using breakthroughs in search architecture and technological advances to create a new paradigm in search, and we now have the resources to reach the next level in pure search."
Ms Patterson said she was "thrilled" with the new injection of capital.
Cuill is one of a small number of companies hoping to challenge Google's pre-eminent position.
Before Google search engines indexed words on sites, recording the results from millions of sites. Google ranks sites based on the number of sites which link to that site.
New technologies hope to find ways of improving on the Google model. However Google itself has developed into a company which has many parts from world maps to searches specific to newspapers. It also has a sales model which many of its competitors can only aspire to.
Observers say that any serious competitor will have to have more than just a better search engine.
- Tom McEnaney
