New social network founded by Romanian woman gets Silicon Valley funding

A new social network funded by a Romanian has received USD 1.5 million in funding from Silicon Valley investors. Headquartered in San Fran­cisco, Knotch, a start-up created by Anda Gansca from Cluj (in picture) and Stephanie Volftsun, is an application for iPhone users which translates contacts' opinions on various issues into visual form using a color coded spectrum moving from hot to cold. The story has been picked up by the New York Times, where Anca says she got the idea for the social network when she was studying at Stanford. She describes it as a “feeling thermometer”, colour ranging from bright red (extremely positive) to dark blue (extremely negative), with nine other shades of feeling in between. The financing round was led by Michael and Xochi Birch, the founders of Bebo, with additional contributions from Avadis Tevanian, a former top Apple technologist; Lars Rasmussen, a Facebook engineer who helped create Google Maps when he worked at the search giant; the venture firms Greylock and Lightspeed; and others, according to he New York Times. The Knotch team is currently made of eight people, including the two co-founders. Two members of the team are Romanian, the co-founder Anda Gansca and engineer Mihai Chioran. Anda Gansca left Romania for Stanford in 2007, and then she used savings after graduation to start a company. She also worked for two venture capital funds, one of which managed about USD 6 billion. editor@romania-insider.com (photo source: Anda Gansca on Facebook)