$2.5 million in increase

Surfingbird will invest in mobile applications and B2B services

Surfingbird, a collective recommendation service, received $2.5 million from Yuri Zhukov’s Klever investment group. TJournal spoke with Surfingbird founder Sergei Shalaev and found out what the funds raised will be used for.

Founder and CEO of Surfingbird Sergey Shalaev

Yuri Zhukov's Klever Internet Investment company bought 25.1% of the Surfingbird project for $2.5 million, which allows users to find interesting content using a recommendation system. Thus, the entire company was valued at $10 million.

The deal was confirmed both by Klever and by the project itself. According to Surfingbird founder and CEO Sergei Shalaev, the money raised will be used to develop the business and “scaling up last year’s achievements.”

Shalaev told TJournal that the team’s efforts will be aimed at increasing recommendations to users. In 2014, the service reached 2 million recommendations views per day, up from 1 million in 2013.

The sharp growth is primarily caused by new Surfingbird mobile applications, Shalaev believes. In September 2013, the service updated its iPhone client with a design in the style of iOS 7. The Android application also received an update: its average rating in the Play Store is 4.7 stars out of 5.

Below is a graph of the growth in views of recommendations from Surfingbird mobile clients.

According to Shalaev, the company is not yet planning to enter the international market, maintaining its focus on Russia. However, Surfingbird is considering entering the Eastern European market by opening an office.

In addition, the team is going to launch a B2B product: a service for content platforms that will allow them to set up a material recommendation system based on Surfingbird data. The service will be provided via an API and via a paid subscription, but its size has not yet been determined.

Surfingbird already attracted investment in 2012. In two stages, the project received first $0.4 million and then another $2.5 million.

At the end of December 2013, several online publications (in particular, Habrakhabr and the Look At Me holding) took up arms against Surfingbird due to changes related to parsing pages of partner sites. The recommendation service abruptly switched pages with content from other publications to a new layout optimized for the mobile version, from which it cut out all site advertising.

In this regard, Look At Media CEO Alexey Ametov accused Surfingbird of stealing content. The founder and CEO of Surfingbird, Sergei Shalaev, responded by saying that in this way the service shows concern for users, and online publications need to stop “praying for CPM.”

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