Kinomi Ltd is a London-based software product company with a highly-experienced board and development team. Established in 2003, it has secured several rounds of venture funding.
Kinomi's Jiglu products are part of the next generation of intelligent discovery, helping making sense of unstructured content and supporting community and collaboration around it.
Background
Kinomi was founded in 2003 by Stephen Hebditch. The idea began after seeing users with collaboration and knowledge sharing needs that were not being met by the current generation of products. Too many tried to force users into new ways of working, and — crucially — they all seemed to ignore where knowledge transfer occurs most in an organisation: e-mail.
To form the product team, Stephen Hebditch brought with him several of the most senior and capable software engineers from his previous company, Mediasurface. The quality of the team and its innovation won Kinomi a Research and Development grant from the Department of Trade and Industry and the company was singled out for publicity for the new scheme.
With the release of the first version of its e-mail-oriented collaboration product, Graham Ransom was retained as non-executive chairman to advise on marketing strategy. In April 2005 Kinomi finalised its first round of angel investment followed in August 2005 by its first venture capital round, with backing from Oxford Technology 4 VCT and Fritas A/S.
Since the original product strategy, the company has refocussed on its core dynamic discovery technology. Significant work has taken place on extending and refining its automatic tagging, and on adding lightweight integration paths that allow it to be used for any content. In October 2007 it launched a free version of its tagging for small blogs at Jiglu.com and in 2008 has been working with a number of publishers to integrate intelligent tagging and topic-centric community functionality in their sites.
Team
Founder and CEO: Stephen Hebditch
Stephen Hebditch founded the company and is responsible for the vision of the Jiglu products and their user experience. He has been working on community-oriented hypertext systems since 1989 and was previously the co-founder and CTO of Mediasurface, Britain's best-known content management company. There he helped create many of the core concepts behind content management in a product rated highly by analysts for its completeness of vision.
Non-executive Chairman: Graham Ransom
Graham Ransom has spent twenty-five years working in the IT industry, holding technical, sales, marketing, management and board appointments for multinational and British companies with revenues ranging from $200k to $2bn. A director of venture capital management company Interregnum for seven years, Graham also works with early stage companies in the technology sector through Venture4th.
