Former Twitter engineers raise $1M for stealthy startup Pushd

Pushd, a secretive startup led by former Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, has raised $1.04 million in new funding, according to a a document the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission released today.

The new funding, which Pushd disclosed to the SEC on Monday, comes almost a year-and-a-half after Pushd raised $1.35 million.

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San Francisco-based Pushd has not identified its investors.

And the company hasn’t said much about what it does in general. Judging by the startup’s unvarnished homepage, Pushd is working on an application called Sense. It offers no clue about what Sense does.

But at least we know about the capabilities and accomplishments of some of Pushd’s employees.

Chowdhury, Pushd’s chief executive, cofounded a Twitter search service called Summize in 2008. Later that year, Twitter acquired Summize for around $15 million in cash and Twitter stock. Twitter liked Summize as a search tool, and it formed the basis of Twitter Search.

In September 2011, Chowdhury announced his departure from Twitter (in a tweet, of course). Before cofounding Summize, Chowdhury was chief architecture for search at AOL.

Chris Carella, Pushd’s head of product, cofounded Subjot, a Twitter-like service focused on individual subjects. Subjot shut down last year.

Pushd engineer Matt Sanford previously led international engineering at Twitter after he joined from Summize, according to his LinkedIn profile. Another Pushd engineer, Ben Cherry, joined in November 2012 after being a front-end engineer at Twitter for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Eric Jensen, a Summize cofounder who joined Twitter alongside Chowdhury, has worked on Pushd, including as its chief technology officer, although it’s listed as past experience on his LinkedIn profile. It’s unclear if he’s still involved. While at Twitter, Jensen worked on scaling the Twitter search tool.

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We’ve reached out to Chowdhury and others who have been involved with Pushd, but we haven’t heard back yet.