Garg was a former IBM researcher and a scientist at Google. He had left Google a few months earlier to build his own search engine after working on some of company’s major search services.

When they met, Garg and De Datta realized they are on the same route- “making it easier for people to find the exact thing they are searching for.”

And in February 2009, Bain Capital made the first investment of $5 million. De Datta recalls, “It was just me and Garg and a PowerPoint presentation, but they gave us $5 million.”

“We hired handful of machine-learning PhDs and left enough money in the bank so we could afford to fail a couple of times before we got it right,” De Datta said.

And now after three years, the company is right on track, with a big list of customers and three services covering search, social media and advertising. They employ 60 people and are so confident about the product that they adopted “Pay for Performance” model. I.e. you need to only pay them for the incremental traffic the service brings.