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Beam has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The company is working on a new web browser that completely rethinks the way you start a web session and browse the web. The startup is founded by Dom Leca and Sébastien Métrot. Dom Leca previously worked on Sparrow, an email app with an opinionated design.
Pace Capital is leading today’s funding round. Several business angels are also participating, such as Christian Reber, Harry Stebbings and Albert Wenger. Existing investors Spark, Amaranthine, C4V and Alven are also investing once again.
Beam is also announcing that it is acquiring RadBlock, an ad blocker for Safari.
If you’re not familiar with Beam, I encourage you to read my previous article on the company — I describe how the product is going to work and the reasoning behind it.
In short, Beam is a web browser focused on knowledge. Many people spend a ton of time mindlessly browsing the web. When you close the last tab, you realize that you didn’t learn much and you don’t have any notes.
You can bookmark stuff, but chances are you either don’t use bookmarks or you never check them. And if you want to find something again, you often end up entering a Google query and starting from scratch.
With Beam, every time you search for something, it creates a new session. Each session is represented by a note card. When you’re done browsing, the note card summarizes your findings. Your search query is the title of the card, and the most important sites appear near the top of the note. Irrelevant content is listed at the end of the note.
You can then add text, remove links, reorganize stuff and create a full-fledged note. Basically, you end up creating comprehensive notes without even realizing it.
Beam is an ambitious project and the company will have to iterate on that initial idea. But it sounds like a great way to start using the web as a kid. You get to learn more about your passions based on what you do on the web.
Right now, there are seven people working for Beam. The company is going to hire machine learning and natural language processing experts as well as more developers.
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