"We are not a Google challenger:" Kosmix founder

By Ruchika Sharma (VCCircle.com)

Indians-founded Kosmix.com claims to organise information better than Google. VCC talks to Anand Rajaraman, co-founder.

Kosmix.com, a new age search engine, has been dubbed as a Google challenger by the media, a description much disliked by its Indian founders, though. The three month old website allows it users to explore the web for a topic by presenting information in the form of relevent videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities related to the topic.

Kosmix's founders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Narayan, both graduates of IIT Madras and PhDs from Stanford University, like to call it 'explore engine'. They also recently launched MeeHive, a site which organises news based on your favourite topics. And they will depend on contextual advertising revenues much the same way Google does.

Rajaraman and Narayan are experienced entrepreneurs. In 1996, they launched Junglee, a comparison shopping site which was sold two years later to Amazon for over $250 million. In 2000, the two started a venture capital firm - Cambrian Ventures.

Their latest venture was RightHealth.com, which became the No.2 health website in the US in 2007. VCCircle speaks to Anand Rajaraman, the co-founder, on why they have launched Kosmix.

Could you explain the business model of Kosmix?

The business model is fairly straight forward – its advertising driven. On Kosmix, people enter topics like diabetes or the name of a destination or a car- something really targeted that they are doing research on - and then we show advertising that is targeted to the key words that they enter. So it’s very straight forward and it’s a model that has been proven by Google. It’s a very lucrative revenue model. Advertising is the only source of Revenue.