YouNoodle secured $1.1 million in its new financing round, TechCrunch reported.
New backers participated in the funding. These include the VegasTechFund of Tony Hsieh and Lars-Henrik- Friis Molin of Sweden. The Amicus Group of Korea, a previous investor, also joined in the round.
The San Francisco-based company was launched in 2008 amid great controversy. Back then, YouNoodle said it was developing a tool that would be able to predict if a startup would succeed. Now, however, YouNoodle is not anymore engaged in the business of prediction but has developed into a platform that offers entrepreneurs a place to look for startup contests and where those who organize these competitions would be able to handle the entire process. It has also turned into a website where bigger companies would gain access to the most promising startups, the report said.
The company, however, is trying to expand the foundation of their operations from merely being a portal for startup competitions. While it will still continue to be a platform for these contests, Chief Executive Officer Torsten Kolind told TechCrunch that it will strive to come up with a data business on top of its operations. He said there's a business opportunity to link startups with bigger corporations that may be interested in working with them or even purchasing them, the report said.
Kolind said, "For us, the pivot we have gone through and are still going through is from looking at ourselves as a technology company powering competitions to an engine for powering what we call the global startup revolution. We can do that more as a data-focused company."
An example of these kinds of data that YouNoodle can glean from the startups participating in its competitions is that the average age of entrepreneurs is 29 years old. Women entrepreneurs made up 28% of the entrepreneurs while firms that focus on biotech, healthcare and science fared better than those geared towards social media and web applications. Finally, those firms that had prototypes did better compared to those that merely had ideas, the report said.
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