Amadeus Capital Partners, the European technology investor, has made the sixth investment from its Seed Fund, with the 650,000 euro financing of Linkdex, a London and San Francisco-based company whose software allows companies and agencies to analyse and manage the natural search results for their online businesses more efficiently. The Amadeus Seed Fund has led the investment with participation from Amadeus III.
Linkdex seeks to address the problem resulting from the internet’s growth into a powerful commercial channel, in which the major search engines are now gatekeepers and where natural search results (and therefore much commerce) are dominated by the top handful of listings. For companies to succeed online, they must rank highly on the search engines while unable to see into or control that process. Linkdex enables companies to look into the web to see which sites and entities are influential for their domains and then enables them to work with that information effectively, in order to manage their natural search results.
“We map hundreds of billions of links rather than just the thousand currently available. We then allow users to simulate search algorithms and find how the web might influence their site. Our specialised search tool and merged web and blog databases have created a web map of over one trillion links, to identify why some web pages are more authoritative and relevant than others. Going beyond the first 1,000 links is crucial, because there are true diamonds in the rough that can make a huge difference in any marketer’s campaign – and we’re the only way to find them.” explains Linkdex’s CEO, John Straw.
John Straw has provided marketing consultancy for blue chip companies, including Audi, Hertz, Rolls Royce, Fiat/Alfa and Cisco and is a 30 year veteran of the advertising and IT sectors. He leads a talented team of search veterans that includes CTO Dr. John Woods, and Vice President of Product Management, Matt Roberts.
“We’re backing Linkdex because it is clear that they’ve identified solutions for the current road blocks in web transparency for online marketers. This has huge potential.” said Laurence John, CEO of Amadeus’ Seed Fund.
In the past three years, the Amadeus Seed Fund has financed five other companies, some of which have launched in their markets and others which have avoided publicity while refining product and running beta programmes. The five companies are XMOS, a semiconductor company with a novel programmable, multi-core, event driven processor that allows complete systems to be built rapidly in software,aiHit, a business information company that automatically creates structured company databases from the unstructured web, oneDrum, which has developed a lightweight desktop application that can turn any application into a rich, collaborative environment, Ambient Industries who are building flook, a new mobile Location Based Services application and Synature, a web text advert optimisation company.
“Seed finance has never been more important than in this environment.” says Laurence John. “Innovation needs to be stimulated and entrepreneurs supported. Early (seed) and later stage venture deals offer great opportunities for investment right now. Our Seed Fund is actively investing and building its portfolio through this downturn so that as we come through it we have some maturing assets to bring to market.”
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For further information, please contact:
Chantal Ligertwood, PR for Amadeus, +44 (0)7976 229 210 chantal@ligertwood.net