Parse.ly Raises $5M For Predictive Analytics Platform That Helps Media Companies Decide What To Publish

Parse.ly has raised $5 million for its platform to do analysis of web site data that does natural language processing (NLP) to define semantic relationships in data, primarily for digital media companies. The funding round was led by Grotech Ventures with participation from Blumberg Capital, ff Venture Capital, and FundersClub.

The company’s analytics platform extracts semantic data and compares it to larger data sets to get insights about the relevance of what it is publishing on its website and what it should post in the future. Parse.ly takes real-time traffic, historical performance, social interactions and other information to get its insight.

For example, the Parse.ly crawling technology analyzes content on a page and pulls out the categories and tags associated with it using NLP technology. The analysis of that data is then compared to other sites.

Parse.ly is an analysis tool but also a developer platform for companies to build new products off its API. That’s the inherent value of connecting services with an NLP engine. NLP is about “finding patterns in languages,” to learn something new. In media, this will be the difference for a new generation of journalists and media types who will use the technology to discover trends faster and target content for any variety of products.