It’s starting to look like the 1990s all over again, especially if you’re trying to keep up with all the new search engines trying to take on Google (or at least carve a niche out of the giant). So can we take it seriously when one of them promises something really different?
It might be better to ask whether we can afford to not take it seriously, at least for a first glance. After all, Google promised something very different with its PageRank concept and the idea that the measure of the importance of a web page is how many incoming links it garners. We can see where Google is now, but we can also see that web search still stands in need of improvement.
Enter hakia. The two-year-old search company recently received $11 million in funding from a range of investors, none of them "the usual suspects" from Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road. Hakia's investors hail from all over the world. They seemingly have little in common, except perhaps an interest in high technology. They include:
Prokom Investments, based in Poland and active in the oil, real estate, IT, financial, and biotech sectors.
KVK, a Turkey-based distributor of mobile telecom services and products.
Murat Vargi, an angel investor from Turkey and a founding shareholder of Turkcell, a mobile operator and the only Turkish company on the New York Stock Exchange.
Lu Pat Ng, an angel investor in Malaysia.
Dr. Pennit Kouri, an economist and VC from Finland who apparently can't stay still - he has taught at Stanford, Yale, New York University, and Helsinki University. He has also worked as an economist for the International Monetary Fund and sat on the board of Nokia in the 1980s.
Alexandra Investment Management, a U.S.-based investment advisory firm.
Bill Bradley, a name familiar to both U.S. basketball fans and political mavens, as he has played for the New York Knicks and served for 18 years as a U.S. Senator (D-NJ).
What is it about hakia that interests so many diverse entities? Part of it may be that Dr. Riza Berkan, founder and CEO of hakia, made the conscious decision to snub most venture capital companies out of fear that they would demand too much power. But there's a lot more to the story than that.
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