Jodange raises $1.2 million to track online opinion-makers

By Joanna Glasner

SAN FRANCISCO (Private Equity Week) - Jodange, which develops online opinion-measurement tools, raised $1.2 million in a Series A funding round last week from venture firm Big Red Ventures and individual investors Dennis Bennie (CEO of XDL Capital), Nick Grewal (part of the venture partner program at Ascent Venture Partners) and Eyal Shavit (president of AxcessNet).

The N.Y.-based company develops software known as "sentiment analysis." It finds experts in a field, and determines the leading influence-wielders for a given topic.

"If you want to get in and understand who is influencing a market, then you would need technology like this to do that kind of analysis," says Jodange CEO Larry Levy, who co-founded the company in early 2007. He sold his previous startup, Semagix Group, a provider of customer tracking and due diligence products, to Warbug Pincus in 2006 for an undisclosed sum.

Jodange, which earns money by selling subscriptions for tracking content on selected topics, uses technology developed at Cornell University, based on research from computational linguistics professor and Jodange Chief Scientist Claire Cardie. The software uses linguistic analysis to extract opinion data and topical information from documents and identify the holder of the viewpoint.

Information that Jodange says can be extracted from documents with its technology can be used to answer questions such as: "What do CEOs worldwide think about subprime lending?" Or: "What does Steve Jobs have to say on the topic of innovation?"

The company says that its customers include the government of Singapore, a large oil company and several pharmaceutical companies.

Jodange charges customers based on topics. It costs about $3,200 a month to track 25 different topics, with additional charges for more.

Tracking online opinion-makers and how their ideas propagate has turned into a growing niche for venture-funded startups. The Jodange service is one of several rolled out by software developers in recent months that are looking to capitalize on perceived demand for better online content-management and opinion-tracking.

Several other startups that seek to aggregate online opinions on their own sites, have raised more than $60 million in venture dollars in the last few months:

• Kosmix, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of a categorization engine for organizing Internet content into topic pages, has raised $48 million to date, including a $20 million round in December, from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich and Time Warner Investments;

• Loomia, a San Francisco-based company that drives traffic to content based on social, behavioral, and contextual data, raised $5.22 million last March from Telefonica, Felicis Ventures and Peacock Equity;

• Invoke Solutions, a Waltham, Mass.-based developer of market research tool that mines online opinions, has raised $46 million to date, including $14.5 million last spring from BEV Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and North Atlantic Capital Corp.;

• Buzzlogic, a San Francisco-based provider of targeted advertising tools based on algorithms that calculate the expertise and credibility of conversational media, has raised $12 million since 2006 from Adams Capital Management, Trans Cosmos USA and Ackerley Partners;

• SodaHead, a Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based operator of a social networking site for sharing opinions, raised $8 million last summer from Mission Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Tech Coast Angels;

• RateItAll, a San Francisco-based online repository of opinions and ratings, raised $800,000 last summer from Accelerator Ventures;

• and Sentimetrix, a Bethesda, Md.-based provider of sentiment and opinion mining software, raised $8,000 from Maryland Technology Development Corp. last March.