OneRiot Snatches Up $7 Million

OneRiot has  just closed their Series C round of $7 million led by Appian Ventures, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Spark Capital. You may recall us mentioning this real-time search engine in a recent post about the new Digsby.

OneRiot delivers realtime web search results to millions of users, both at OneRiot.com and to 3rd parties who utilize OneRiot’s Search API. The company will use proceeds of this funding to further enhance its core search product and to support its fast-growing partner network.

That partner network is quite impressive. Besides Digsby and now Yoono, OneRiot also has partnered with Yahoo and Microsoft, who recently released a version of Internet Explorer bundled with OneRiot realtime search. It seems that OneRiot is definitely on the road to success.

Using their PulseRank system (something like Google’s Pagerank, but for the real-time web), OneRiot helps you locate the hottest news, stories and videos that people are buzzing about right now on any topic. It pulls in links and content in realtime from services like Twitter and Digg. They also manage their own panel of 3 million users who have opted in to share their realtime information with the service.

OneRiot has taken an interesting path thus far. Rather than trying to pad their service with feature after feature and going through a bunch of redesigns, they have chosen to focus on their backend. They offer a rich API which allows 3rd party developers to easily integrate OneRiot into their offerings. They have focused on creating partnerships with various companies. They have kept the service pretty simple since their launch in 2008. It makes me think they somehow got a hold of Twitter’s playbook.

While I don’t really see a good use for it personally, I can see where it could be a valuable tool for others. As far as real-time goes, I’m used to the fire hose of FriendFeed and you just don’t get that same thing on OneRiot. Maybe if they decide to index services besides just Twitter and Digg, that will change. For now, looks like OneRiot is on the up-and-up. I wonder how they plan to monetize this.