Hubub raised $8.5 million for its Series A financing round, TechCrunch reported.
The names of the investors were not named in the report but they included a number of private investors. Proceeds of the round will be used to help scale the company and grow its engineering talent so they can keep on building the platform they rolled out in beta late in 2013, the report said.
Hubub is a Toronto and New York-based startup that allows thematic or topic-based discussion. Hubub Founder and CEO Peter L. Corsell told TechCrunch in an interview, "Specifically what really gave us the idea was that we were watching the Egyptian protests, in the latter part of the Arab Spring and we looked at the way people were using Facebook and Twitter, which was both inspiring and novel. Yet it occurred to us that there was also an unmet need to give a tool to rapidly convene passionate, engaged communities around a topic of interest."
Hubub seeks to build communities, allowing users to contribute their own content or share what they found on the web, on particular topics. The topics nodes that are formed are called Hububs and they are generated and curated by the users themselves. In addition, the platform also serves as an aggregation search engine since users can also look at the content that is automatically collected on specific keywords, the report said.
Corsell added, "When you think about the future of search broadly, I see it bifurcating between what I would think of as more tactical queries where you have a question and there's one right answer or a small finite pool of good answers. The other type of search is, if you Google for example 'what were the most searched for terms in 2013,' it's topics: It's 'iPad,' it's Bengazi,' it's 'Kate Middleton.' What excites me about Hubub is as the community matures, it becomes a really great place to go to immerse yourself, in articles, in photos and videos and more."
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