Factual lands $1M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, Idealab

Factual, an online data management company whose stated goal is to help people create as many open databases on the Internet as possible, was founded last fall by Gil Elbaz, whose previous company, Applied Semantics, was bought by Google as core technology to the search engine’s unique AdSense ad-serving system.
VentureBeat has obtained the text of a blog post going up later today, in which Elbaz will announce seed funding that includes two big-idea funders, Andreessen Horowitz and Idealab.
Here’s the post in full:
Gil’s Corner: An Update From Gil
Hi all,
First off, Happy New Year! (A little late for that, I know… but better late than never).
I wanted to give you an update on the business side of Factual and some exciting new developments.
Since our launch in October 2009, we’ve been very busy at our offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai — expanding the company, fine-tuning the product, launching new features, and learning from our ever-growing community. Factual tables are already demonstrating the power and usefulness of our large-scale open data platform. For example, Creative Commons tweeted about the 4 million record website data table which showed who is using CC licenses.
After we launched Factual, I set out to garner support from a targeted list of industry luminaries who believe in Factual’s mission to build a powerful open data platform used and supported by an enthusiastic community. And today, I’m very happy to announce that we’ve attracted a group of early-stage investors that will guide us as we work to refine our product, hire exceptional employees, and tackle exciting new markets.
Our investors are an A-list group of accomplished internet and media pioneers. They include:
Andreessen Horowitz – Founders, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz
Bill Gross – Founder/Chairman, Idealab
Danny Rimer – Index Ventures
Esther Dyson – Founder, EDventure Holdings
Founder Collective
Gunderson Dettmer
Lee and June Stein
Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL
Miramar Venture Partners
Richard Rosenblatt – CEO, Demand Media
Scott Kurnit – Founder, About.com
Thomas Lehrman – Founder, Gerson Lehrman Group
Tom Unterman – Founder, Rustic Canyon Ventures
We are looking forward to working with this astute group of advisors and gleaning their insights. Of course, this means that the Factual team will be working twice as hard in 2010 — to not only meet and exceed the expectations of our investors, but to achieve our goal of bringing greater transparency, accuracy and openness to data. One of my resolutions this year is to tweet and blog more, so you should be hearing from me on a regular basis.
Thanks again to our group of investors. Let’s make 2010 the year of “open”!
Factually yours,
Gil