Business.com (www.business.com), the search engine designed and organized exclusively for business, announced on November 8 that Benchmark Capital (www.benchmark.com), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, has invested $10 million in Business.com. Business.com joins the impressive list of Benchmark Capital investments that includes eBay, Red Hat Software, Handspring and Juniper Networks. This new round of funding will enable Business.com to invest in technology infrastructure, product development, and sales and marketing to meet the growing market demand for its vertical business search capabilities.
Business.com was built from the ground up with an exclusive focus on fulfilling the search needs of business professionals. Through its proprietary taxonomy, business interpretation of search terms, and comprehensive directory structure, it has been able to deliver a markedly different search experience for business professionals than general search engines do. By categorizing business results in an intuitive order and filtering out unrelated consumer content, Business.com is able to anticipate the needs of professionals and allows them to easily locate relevant business information. Today, Business.com serves the needs of more than three million business searchers each month across a wide array of industries and job functions.
William Gurley, partner at Benchmark Capital, said that having surveyed the business search space, Benchmark Capital recognized Business.com as the established leader, that Business.com’s vast distribution network and consistently positive feedback from advertisers is a testament to its ability to deliver high quality leads, that with its exclusive focus on business search and directory Business.com has built a self-sustaining and profitable business, and that Benchmark Capital sees this investment as an opportunity to further leverage the company's technology, early leadership position and solid management team to fully realize its market potential.
