Amsterdam-based Silk, a cloud-based data publishing platform, today announced a $1.6 million extended seed round investment from its existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) (Update – April 2023: The startup seems to be no longer in business under this website, and we therefore deactivated the original link). This recent financing round brings Silk’s total funding to date of $3.7 million.
The Silk platform lets non-technical users manage their structured and unstructured content as easy-to-search collections of web pages and visualizations. Knowledge workers who previously wasted hours each week searching through spreadsheets, text documents and presentations can quickly upload this content into Silk, which converts the information into collections of structured web pages, called Silk sites. By attaching specific user-designated tags to the HTML in Silk sites, Silk builds a semantic map of the content that allows users to quickly generate searches based on any combination of tags, or create detailed visualizations such as charts, tiles, or maps intuitively with just a few clicks of a mouse. Silk’s unique visualizations make data richer, more accessible and more impactful.
The young company today also announced ‘Silk for Teams’, the startups’s first paid offering. With this offering, Silk allows clients and organisations to build private, secure Silk sites backed by a rapid-response support tier for paid subscription customers. Proven use cases for Silk include project management, customer relationship management, historical data capture and analysis, human resources intranets, competitive analysis, and lightweight graphics generation for reports and websites.
To date, 16,000 registered Silk users have created more than 300,000 individual pages on the Silk, a tally that is growing at roughly 20% monthly. Early adopters have come from a wide range of industries, including digital marketing, venture capital, government, media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Users include The Guardian, a global video services provider, a leading American digital marketing agency, a large European Union government agency, and hundreds of startups across the EU.
By the way: You can find out about other interesting startups from The Netherlands in this list.