We recently announced the Twilio Fund, a new investment vehicle for startups building on top of the Twilio cloud communications platform. Today we’re thrilled to welcome another addition to the 500 Startups platform micro-fund family – the CrowdFlower Fund! The CrowdFlower Fund is a $250,000 platform micro-fund that will invest in startups integrating with CrowdFlower’s cloud labor platform.

Why CrowdFlower?
CrowdFlower helps companies with many types of tasks that humans do better and faster than machine algorithms by sourcing people for their processing power. A person can quickly tell you if a photo contains a person or just a landscape, if a product is categorized correctly, or if your business listings are accurate. Say you want to make a new dictionary — like CrowdFlower user Wordnik — that accounts for the way a word “feels,” in order to provide the appropriate connotation. A computer program can’t decipher the feelings behind most words, but a human can. Other startups that have integrated CrowdFlower’s real-time human input include:

• PeopleBrowsr (sentiment analysis of social media content)

• Skout (content moderation)

• Bizo (tagging and organizational categorization of businesses)

 
Like Twilio, we see CrowdFlower as an emerging platform that can help fuel innovative, creative startups using its tools and APIs. We also believe in the power of crowd sourcing technology and are excited to help kickstart the CrowdFlower ecosystem.

Details on the CrowdFlower Fund:
Starting today, we’re accepting submissions for the CrowdFlower Fund. The structure is similar to the Twilio Fund:

• The CrowdFlower Fund is a $250,000 fund run by 500 Startups.

• We’ll offer investments of $10,000 in up to 10 companies for a one percent stake. In addition, one or more of these companies may be selected for a $50,000 investment and invitation to participate in the soon-to-be announced accelerator program at the 500 Startups space in Mountain View, Calif.

• Interested startups should submit their application athttp://500startups.com/crowdflowerfund.

• We’ll be reviewing submissions on a rolling basis and will reach out to you if we’re interested in your product.

 
Bring it on!