Today we are very excited to announce the completion of a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from existing Silk investor Atomico and three additional investors. The raised amount will be used to expand our team and to keep improving our product and infrastructure.

We are thrilled to partner up with NEA, the biggest US venture capital firm with a committed capital of $13 billion, who happened to announce their new $2.6 billion fund last week. Also, its a great confirmation that our existing investor Atomico (the fund co-founded by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrm) followed up on their investment from last year by participating in this round as well.

Additional backers in the round are Anil Hansjee, a well known angel and advisor to many companies, including Fon, who previously served as Google’s head of corporate development EMEA; Jens Christensen, best known for his role as CEO of Ellerdale (acquired by Flipboard); and Philippe Cases, an angel investor and entrepreneur, currently CEO of Spoke Software.

What are we working on?

For those who dont know us: Silk is a place to create, share and find structured information. Share those special places in Madrid, the video games you are playing or the length of your children as they grow. Public transport companies can use Silk to find patterns in their delays. Human rights organizations can keep track of violations by governments. Investors use Silk to publish their investment portfolio.

Weve learned that Silk comes in handy for information that:

• has some structure,
• is valuable to share in real time, but
• should also remain available to be used later

Example

A current example would be a Silk site about Olympic medals. You may want to keep track of all Olympic medals as they are won, or perhaps filter on your country or on a sport you are interested in. The information should also remain available to generate overviews from, such as a map of the world indicating the number of medals each country has won or simply a list of medals won by The Netherlands.

We are very excited to be working with both Atomico and NEA, as this will help us to further build on our vision. If you are interested in using Silk, sign up here. Organizations who want to use Silk professionally, feel free to get in touch.

And finally, yes, we are hiring!

Investment will bring groundbreaking technology and product to market

Amsterdam, The Netherlands May 18, 2011

Silk, the Amsterdam-based web startup, today announced that it has completed a 320,000 ($475,000) funding round led by Atomico, the venture capital firm led by Niklas Zennstrm, who also co-founded Skype.

Other investors participating in the round are Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, Han de Groot, founder of MetrixLab, Hans-Poul Veldhuyzen van Zanten and Mark de Lange, who is Founding Partner of Global Grid Capital.

Silk is a web-based tool that allows content creators to provide their content in a more structured manner on the web. The tool enables users to choose the data they want from the mass of information available and to view and arrange it in ways that make sense to them.

It is at the forefront of the Web 3.0 trend that helps users interact with the huge and growing volume of information online. A video explanation of the product is available at http://www.silkapp.com/.

Silk last month won the Best overall startup award at The Next Web Conference, a leading European technology conference, in Amsterdam. It is in private beta at the moment, but people can request invites to get early access to the product at the companies website.

The new funds will be used to bring the product and technology to market and scale up development efforts.

Salar al Khafaji, CEO and co-founder of Silk, said: Silk allows content creators to present information to audiences in a more engaging way, and allows users to sort through information and visualize results in compelling ways.

For example, publishers can use it to enhance the value of their content, and the service they offer to audiences, and we are already working with several publishers to create Silk powered web sites. We also have plans for other uses of the product.

Geoffrey Prentice, Partner at Atomico, said: We are delighted to have led this investment round. It highlights the huge potential that Silk has, and our enthusiasm for working with talented co-investors. The caliber of people participating in this deal reflects the companies outstanding products and management team.

Floris Rost van Tonningen, co-founder of Hyves, the largest social network in the Netherlands, said: Im very impressed with the vision of the Silk team who have developed a powerful technology that is bound to revolutionize the space of content creation and search.

Mark de Lange, an investor who is Founding Partner at Global Grid Capital, said: As the amount of online content and data grows exponentially, and will continue to do so, publishers and consumers alike will need tools that enable them to derive real value from the available data. I believe Silk is uniquely positioned to be one of these tools.

Silks technology has been in development since 2009 and the company started rolling out its beta platform this year in co-operation with The Next Web, one of the largest tech blogs in the world, and NRC, a leading Dutch newspaper, who were early users.

To stay up-to-date on Silk, please visit www.silkapp.com and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/silkapp.