Answers.com Grows With ForeSee Acquisition

Answers.com has taken a big step towards fleshing-out its total brand reach in the social age. The privately-held website has acquired ForeSee, a customer service company that tracks consumers measurements on web, mobile and social media platforms, among others.

According to TechCrunch, Answers raised $300 million in new funding in equity from existing investors, including Summit Partners, TA Associates, AFCV and others. SunTrust Robinson Humphrey and Silicon Valley Bank led the debt financing transaction in Answers.

One of the top sites of its kind, Answers was founded in 1999 and was a publicly-traded company until February 2011, when it was bought by AFCV.

The site is looking to expand from being a simple question-and-answer platform, to providing a more well-rounded user experience for its customers. The web site Venture Beat says ForeSee's customers include roughly half the Fortune 100, as well as top Internet retailers, major bank, and government agencies.

“Our recent acquisitions of Webcollage and Easy2 have strengthened our industry leadership, and ForeSee further augments the value we can deliver to our clients,” David Karandish, CEO of Answers, said in a statement.

ForeSee was founded in 2001 and is currently run out of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Search engines like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) may yet remain the easiest portals to get pertinent and trivial questions answered on the Internet -- but with a more personal touch towards its customers, Answers appears ready to take on that market.