Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowChaCha Search Inc. said yesterday that it has raised $12 million in equity financing, which will allow the Carmel company to ramp up its advertising sales and support its newly opened New York office.
The company also disclosed that it had eliminated 25 jobs, shrinking its work force to 56. Several executives – including two development directors, two product managers, a vice president of engineering and director of marketing communications – were among the casualties.
ChaCha also implemented a companywide pay cut of 10 percent, with upper management taking an even larger reduction, CEO Scott Jones said this morning.
This isn’t ChaCha’s first belt-tightening. Late last year, it cut eight full-time workers.
“Revenue is climbing; it’s just not climbing as fast as I want it to,” Jones said. “There will come a time when it accelerates very rapidly.”
Founded in September 2006, ChaCha bills itself as a human-assisted Internet search engine. It’s best known for a mobile-phone service that provides free responses to user questions via text messages from human “guides.”
The company has about 55,000 guides, who are paid based on the number of questions they answer. No guides were eliminated in the job cuts.
ChaCha has raised $42 million during the past three years, some of it from heavyweight West Coast investors, including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Compaq founder Rod Canion.
The additional financing “is a tribute to the strength of our service and the continuing rapid growth of the mobile search and advertising market,” Jones said in the statement.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.