With $8M From Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs; Urban Compass Wants To Build A Hyper-Local, Human-Powered Database

If there are a lot of companies out there chasing down the holy grail of location services,?Urban Compass, a startup still in stealth mode, believes it could be the one of the lucky ones that might just find it. Urban Compass is co-founded by Ori Allon, a superstar engineer who?s been thinking about search and discovery for years already, having already sold businesses to Google and Twitter; and Robert Reffkin, a superstar ex-Goldman Sachs banker. Before they’ve even launched a product, though, their company has already managed to catch the eye (and faith) of several top-shelf investors. Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, the CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault, SalesForce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff and ZocDoc’s CEO Cyrus Massoumi, have come together to give Urban Compass $8 million in seed money, one of the highest publicly-disclosed seed rounds of 2012, which is now being used to track down the best talent to build its product. Location, location, location There have been some notable advances in the world of hyperlocal services from the likes of Google (mapping data matched up against local services), Yelp (user-generated reviews), Foursquare (turning hyperlocal into a social network) and more.?But to date, no single company has owned the space, in the same way that Google has come to dominate search, or Facebook social networking. Part of the reason for that might be because no single company has been successful enough in personalising recommendations in the way that you would expect something “hyperlocal” to do. Or, in the words of Ken Howery, a partner at Founders Fund, “The mobile/hyperlocal guys out there (e.g Google, FourSquare)?know where you have been, but don’t really know who you are as a person and don’t do a great job at making quality recommendations to you for important, complex decisions.” The approaches to hyperlocal services can vary but the goal is the same: it’s about giving people the most informative and accurate information about where they are, where they want to go, and where they should be — and then converting that into a business that makes money, without upsetting too many privacy advocates in the process. Urban Compass promises an approach different from everything that has been tried so far. Not a whole lot is known yet about Urban Compass, and an interview with the two co-founders, Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin, yielded little in the way of details. Here is

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