San Francisco (PRWEB) June 18, 2013
Parakweet, Inc. today announced it secured $ 2 million in funding. The company has developed a proprietary artificial intelligence platform that uses social media- specific natural language processing (NLP) to detect and extract meaning from millions of unstructured conversations and accurately identify consumer behavior, intent and sentiment. Parakweet will use the funds for new product innovation and continued development of BookVibe, its recently launched book discovery engine.
The funding was led by a group of high-profile investors including Scott Banister, an early investor in PayPal, Zappos and Powerset; Alan Braverman, co-founder of Yammer and Eventbrite; David Jeske, former Director of Engineering at Google; and other angel investors and entrepreneurs.
Parakweet’s platform is fine-tuned for specific vertical markets, in order to best extract meaning from short, unstructured social media updates. BookVibe, Parakweet’s consumer-facing book recommendations product, scans a user’s social graph and extracts tweets that are actually about books with 96 percent accuracy. It also detects and distinguishes the person’s sentiment about the book—not the overall tweet. For example, if a tweet reads: “I’m reading War and Peace since the weather is lousy,” BookVibe understands that lousy refers to the weather, not the book. Some of the behaviors BookVibe identifies include “intent to read,” “read” and “recommend.” Furthermore, the Parakweet platform does not require users to join or recreate yet another social network.
“We started Parakweet to distill actionable insights from the unstructured language of social media,” said CEO and co-founder Ramesh Haridas. “Today, we’re providing consumers with book recommendations based on a user’s personal interests and the interests and affinities of the people they follow. Our platform also allows companies to tap into the behavioral signals consumers are generating across social media and uncover actionable and competitive insights.”
Added Haridas, “We’re inspired to have the backing and support of such a notable group of angel investors and tech entrepreneurs. With this funding, we’ve taken a decisive step to transform how meaning and understanding is derived from massive amounts of social media, which often includes slang, abbreviations and no punctuation—something that Parakweet is using natural language processing to solve.”
Investor Scott Banister added, “Parakweet’s disruptive technology gets under the hood of social media language and captures human behaviors with remarkable accuracy. Books and movies are just the tip of the iceberg for applications of Parakweet’s natural language processing engine.”
Parakweet was founded by a team of successful entrepreneurs and computer scientists including serial entrepreneur Ramesh Haridas; machine learning and search technologist Kiam Choo; and artificial intelligence software architect Ilmars Poikans.
About Parakweet
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in San Francisco, Parakweet is a platform that offers product recommendations to consumers and social media analytics and metadata to global media companies. Parakweet’s proprietary artificial intelligence platform uses natural language processing technology to extract meaning from unstructured social content and accurately identify associated behaviors, intent and sentiment. Parakweet’s first product BookVibe is a social discovery and book recommendation engine for consumers launched in 2013. For more information, please visit http://www.parakweet.com.
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