True Knowledge – pioneer of a radically new approach to Internet search – has announced it has raised more than $4m in a second round of funding and has achieved significant milestones towards the internet industry goal of intelligently answering, in plain English, questions asked on any topic.

The second round funding was led by existing investors Octopus Ventures and angel investors. It brings the total raised by True Knowledge in the last 12 months to $5.4m (£2.7m). The funding will allow the company to expand its management team, further develop its products and move to a roll-out in the next 12 months.

True Knowledge’s technology is a ground-breaking ‘answer engine’ that has the potential to change the way factual information is made accessible via the Internet.

Traditionally, search engines use statistical relationships between the words to find documents and web pages that might be relevant to the subject of the search. But these systems cannot make sense of the content. Rather than try to teach computers to read and understand the thousands of text-based web pages that are produced every hour, True Knowledge neatly side-steps this problem by structuring this knowledge in a way that computers can access.

The result is a unique online tool that is able to provide an intelligent response to questions without human intervention by applying information gathered from several sources.

It’s hard to show enough detail.  For a Beta trial invite, email me at Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com

William Reeve, serial entrepreneur and Chairman of True Knowledge said: “True Knowledge’s exciting technology has impressed everybody who’s seen it over the last few months and it is terrific for the team, as well as for Cambridge and the UK as a whole, that this confidence has been reflected in one of the biggest pre-revenue fundraisings in the European venture sector this year.”

William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder of True Knowledge, has been working in this area for many years. “Octopus Ventures are very supportive investors that understand our business. We are on a steep development curve and this level of investment will help accelerate our progress towards an open beta site which will increase the volume of knowledge contributors. This is an important stepping stone towards the goal of a consumer friendly tool.”

Alex Macpherson, Chief Executive, Octopus Ventures, explains: “True Knowledge will revolutionise the way people search for information on the internet. The company has an incredibly ’smart’ technology that brings a degree of logic to search that has until now been lacking. We were very keen to be involved with True Knowledge and to be working with their incredibly strong management team. We wish True Knowledge every success for the future and fully expect them to be a global brand in due course.”

True Knowledge’s technology is complementary to existing search engines and offers a new class of application. It provides the exciting potential of creating a universally accessible knowledge-base that is capable of learning; deducing the answer to a question from the information it already has and adding new information gained from interaction with the questioner to expand the depth and breadth of its knowledge.

For example, if you asked ‘who was the US president when John Lennon died?’ It would combine information about the duration of the presidencies, with life and time facts about the ex-Beatle, and give the correct answer as a name with references. As the answer is based on more than one source it provides an objective answer, independent of commercial interests.

True Knowledge has run a successful beta trial with over 10,000 expert users to put its question-answering website through its paces. This has provided valuable proof of concept and knowledge addition complementing the in-house development of the service’s encyclopaedic capabilities.

The accessibility of the stored information to computers means that the system can also be used to provide API services via a computer-computer interface. Examples of the kinds of services possible include local time calculations, name-to-gender, and geolocation based on IP address.