WIV Labs, a data & social analytics startup which received almost $1M early stage investment from K-Cube Ventures and SMBA (Korean Government), today announced the beta launch of its social Q&A service Qaster (qaster.com). Qaster is the first and only service to archive questions and answers from the 500 million messages generated on Twitter daily. The company aggregates this data and allows users to search through its website. Qaster makes useful Q&As accessible to users from its database and displays answers consecutively under the question in the original tweet.
According to Dongug Kim, CEO of WIV Labs, “Qaster mines information from conversations. Right now we collect and show informative Q&As, but we plan to create an improved content service that provides that information in a structured and organized form for users.”
WIV Labs was founded by the programmers and data scientists that developed South Korea’s #2 search engine, Daum. One of the WIV Labs team’s technical achievements in the Q&A service field was innovating the costly and time-consuming process of building a Q&A database. WIV Labs has leveraged the technical expertise of its team so that it can now build Qaster’s growing database more easily, in less time and at less cost than the previous Q&A services.
K Cube Ventures, one of South Korea’s leading early stage venture capital firms, invested $470k in WIV Labs in September 2013. “We made the decision to invest in WIV Labs before it even became incorporated because of the team’s strength and ability to solve the hardest technology problems,” according to Jimmy Rim, Founder & CEO of K Cube Ventures. “As Korea’s top-tier search engine experts, I believe that the WIV Labs team is the best team to create high-quality global SNS search and Q&A services.”
At that time Korea’s Small & Medium Business Administration (SMBA) also invested $470,000 in WIV Labs as part of its Global R&D Program. It is a highly selective government investment program that provides funds to technology-based companies that are creating innovations in the tech field, and demonstrates one of the many ways that the Korean government is supporting tech startups and innovation on the peninsula.
About WIV Labs: WIV Labs is a data and social analytics company founded by the programmers and data scientists who developed South Korea’s #2 search engine, Daum, end-to-end from scratch. WIV Labs aims to become a leader in the social Q&A field by collecting and analyzing the large-scale amounts of data produced by global social networking services.
About K Cube Ventures: K Cube Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm that was established in 2012 by Brian Kim, founder of Korea’s top mobile platform Kakao, and Jimmy Rim, an experienced venture capitalist. K Cube Ventures manages two early stage funds, the K Cube Venture Fund (USD 11M) and the Kakao Venture Fund (USD 30M), and has a number of star portfolio companies including Fincon (recognized as one of the world’s top 10 mobile game developers), Frograms, Wishlink, Neptune and more.
