Ginio, a young Latin American-focused company that has built a platform for country-specific and vertical search systems that leverage the social graph, just raised around $600,000 in seed money from its founders, and angel investors. Investors include:
Simon Vielma, Co-founder and CEO
Lucas Morea
Frank Schilling
Ginio’s vertical platform allows to deploy verticals that cover multiple domains (local, music, shopping, etc.) with some unique features. They plan to integrate all verticals into a universal offering in a much similar way to that of South Korean search engine Naver.com. Ginio founders worked for top-notch companies such as Baidu, Microsoft, Alibaba, and Kuxun.
Ginio, claims to focus on Latin America where “Google and Yahoo have very limited offerings beyond simple web search. In fact, in countries such as Panama and Ecuador Google is the only engine with a localized offering, the country domains of yahoo.ec , yahoo.pa, etc. are not operating since Yahoo has no offerings in these and many other countries in Latin America."
Simon Vielma, Co-Founder and CEO says that he believes that great, well localized search products can thrive in small markets. “Take Czech Republic for example. The country has a population of around 10 million people, 5 million internet users, and $200 billion in GDP, yet Seznam, the search leader there, has revenues of around US$ 100 million and it is estimated to be valued at $1 billion”
