About us

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What Is Parse.ly?

Parse.ly provides insights to the web's best publishers.

We help the best sites on the web connect their users with content they'll love. We do this through a deep understanding of online content. Our flagship product, Parse.ly Dash, is currently in beta and will launch soon. From 2010-2011, P3, the Parse.ly Publisher Platform, has provided deep content targeting technology that drives increased pageviews and revenues.

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The Founders

Parse.ly was founded in 2009 by Sachin Kamdar (current CEO) and Andrew Montalenti (current CTO). Sachin and Andrew met at NYU, and became friends and college roommates. During college they regularly bounced around startup ideas. Their first idea was a user-driven online review site with Google Maps integration as a core feature. A few months later -- before they could write their first line of code -- Yelp.com was started. Their next idea was a way to save online news stories and print them later. A couple years later -- while the idea lingered on their TODO list -- Instapaper was launched. After these two experiences, Sachin and Andrew realized execution mattered a lot more than ideas.

Our Story

In early 2009, we started collaborating on some new ideas, but this time, we actually built things. We worked out of cafes and our apartments, spending many hours at a beloved East Village tea shop and cafe called Gramstand (which unfortunately has since closed). One of our first projects was a "news analytics" system that actually predicted the 2008 Presidential Election based on news story volume, sentiment, and trends. In the summer of 2009, as we got better at prototyping, we quit our jobs and started bootstrapping a budding business. Then, our world was turned upside down when our company was selected as 1 of 10 among 500 applicants for the DreamIT Ventures incubator program in Philadelphia.

We moved to Philly for the summer, living in the Spruce Hill Startup House with a few other founders. At DreamIT, the team grew to three people (Didier joined) and we built and launched the Parse.ly Reader. This product gained traction from several thousand users and was featured in NPR, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Philadelphia Business Journal and ZDnet, among others. This rich internet application for personalized news earned accolades from tech reporters and users alike. After these three months of rapid development -- working out of the DreamIT office and hacking from the Startup House -- Parse.ly returned to NYC.

We knew there was value in providing a product for consumers, but we wanted to target more users even more quickly. Instead of just building a product for the enlightened technorati, we wanted to impact the billion people who read the news online daily.

That was our vision behind Parse.ly Dash and P3. We launched P3 in mid-2010, and have worked round the clock to keep up with all the demand for our service. Our platform and API allows online publishers to optimize their existing content through personalization. Users get to visit the same news sites they know and love, but those sites now understand their tastes and interests to deliver more relevant content. P3 has driven millions of clickthroughs for the web's finest online properties. We launched Dash in March 2011, and it now tracks over 500 million pageviews a month and is growing rapidly.

Investors - "The Backers"

Board of Directors - "The Deciders"

Advisors - "The Wisemen"