ChaCha closes $20 million in new funding, relaunches site

ChaCha Search Inc. has closed a $20 million round of funding from a pair of new investment groups and relaunched its website to improve the user experience and engagement with advertising.
The Indianapolis-based company secured its latest round of financing from VantagePoint Venture Partners and Rho Ventures. ChaCha says it now reaches more than 15 million unique visitors every month and that it has already surpassed Google Inc. (GOOG) in mobile text search queries. The company says it has answered nearly a billion questions in the past two years and that it’s ramping up to roll out a new MMS service that will deliver movie trailers, other video, coupon images and rich media adds to mobile devices.
“We are fortunate to have VantagePoint and Rho joining this round of funding, which will allow ChaCha to continue to expand its real-time, human-powered, free answers service. Our new investors clearly recognize the value of our business, which helps advertisers ‘get into the conversation’ with ChaCha users who frequently ask their ’smart friend’ questions about anything and everything,” CEO Scott Jones said. “Our business delivers high value to both users and advertisers. It’s a compelling equation.”
ChaCha is also fresh off a site relaunch, which leverages HTML5 and CSS3 technology to includes more images and videos in the nearly 2 million results it delivers every day. Jones said ChaCha opted to go with HTML5 because it provides the company with better mobile capabilities, decreases the amount of time it takes for a video to load and enhance the ad experience.