Aardvark

Aardvark was founded in late 2007 by Max Ventilla, Damon Horowitz, Nathan Stoll, and Rob Spiro.

Aardvark was conceived as the first Social Search engine: a way to find people, not web pages, that have specific information. In 2008 the Aardvark team built out the core Aardvark product, while conducting an extensiveuser-researchcampaign to refine the user experience for this new Social Search paradigm.

This work culminated in a series of beta releases in Summer 2009, making Aardvark available over email, Instant Messenger, Twitter, and the iPhone. Following the popular success of these applications, Aardvark publically launched Social Search on the web in October 2009, open to everyone atvark.com.

In September 2008, Aardvark closed Series A financing withAugust Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures. The company is proud to have had over a dozen well-known technology thought leaders as individual investors, including Michael Dearing, Sep Kamvar, Marc Andreessen, Deep Nishar, Sean Fanning, Aydin Senkut, Shervin Pishevar, and others.

Over 2009, the company built an amazing technical team of over twenty people, including engineers from each of Silicon Valley’s major technology companies, four AI Ph.D.s, and founders from a dozen different successful startups. Andwe’re still hiring.

In February 2010 Aardvark was acquired by Google, and continues to operate as part of the Google family of products.

Find out more at http://vark.com/