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Stealth startup fixTopia has raised roughly $500,000 in seed funding from individuals and angels including Reed Hundt, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, says Lee Rand, the company's founder and CEO. Hundt, who has invested in more than two dozen startups since he left government service in 1997, says he invested in fixTopia because "he believes in Lee and believes in the product."


Rand declines to offer details about the company's business except to explain that it would combine virtual experts with "semantic data capture." That's not saying much, but fixTopia's history offers clues about what it does.

Rand formed the company in January as an Internet service aimed at improving online support for retail customers. Realizing that the technology could do more, he and his three co-founders at fixTopia developed a two-pronged approach that involves both marketing the company's software to enterprises and creating an online community that can be monetized through advertising.

My guess is that fixTopia will offer online product support through this community, supported with software that answers people's questions by drawing from the emergent semantic Web to pull information from around the Internet. With such a community, fixTopia becomes far more useful to corporations, which could use it, say, to explore what customers don't understand about their products. (Other companies offering this sort of "people-powered customer service" include BazaarVoice Inc. and Satisfaction Inc.) Rand says several businesses are working with fixTopia to develop the product, but he declined to name them.

For more details, we'll have to wait until the first quarter of next year, when Rand plans to launch a public beta. Around that time, fixTopia will likely start seeking $2 million to $4 million in a Series A round, Rand says. Until then, the startup might raise an additional $100,000 to $150,000 from its angel investors to continue its product development. - Stacey Higginbotham

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