Blog plug-in Zemanta scores $3M as it heads towards profitability

Blog plug-in Zemanta has raised $3 million in venture capital as it attempts to bring “semantic” blogging to the rest of the world, the company said Wednesday.

London-based Zemanta bills itself as “Your Blogging Assistant.” It lets bloggers fiddle with content that is more specific for their blog, suggests related content and pictures, and promotes posts on online platforms best suited for the blog’s theme.

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The startup, which was founded in 2007 after winning $100,000 in seed money from well-known tech industry competition Seedcamp, said in a statement it now expects to achieve a profit without further infusions of capital. It was founded by Boštjan Špetič and Andraž Tori (pictured).

It now has partnerships with major players in the blogging space WordPress and Blogger and had 100,000 active users in October and over 1 million recommendations daily.

Zemanta competes primarily with other blog enhancers like Snap and Apture, all of whom are looking to capture a small portion of the over 60 million blogs currently in operation worldwide.

The company said in a blog post that it will use the money to further promote innovation within its program and advertising divisions as it turns away from promotion and more towards monetizing itself.

“Earlier this year we started experimenting with what we call ‘promoted recommendations,’” said Zemanta. “It really caught attention of large content publishers, so we will be investigating it further. We hate obtrusive banner ads and we know there are much better opportunities. We believe in ‘advertising as content.’”

Zemanta received this funding round from previous investors Eden Ventures and Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to date to $6 million.