A community contributed technical services provider, FixYa recently announced that it has received an amount of $6 Million in Series B funding from Mayfield Fund and PitangoVenture Capital. Mayfield Fund has been at the forefront of investing in emerging businesses in the U.S., China and India over the past 38 years and currently has $2.7 billion under its management. Pitango Venture Capital with offices in Israel and Silicon Valley, California, has been investing in technology firms globally since the year 1993. FixYa had also raised $2 million in Series A as an initial seed investment in the year 2007. The company announced that it will use the fresh funds to upgrade and expand its operations in Israel and the United States, to offer new products and services to its rapidly growing user base.

Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, FixYa offers a comprehensive technical support website, which stores manuals and troubleshooting guides for more than 800,000 consumer product spanning several categories, including lawn mowers, strollers and hard drives. FixYa is a community contributed organization and claims a data base of more than 7 million users. They contribute an average of 100,000 queries and solutions each month.

While most companies tend to ignore providing good technical support services for their products, FixYa provided a platform and network site for customers to help each other. FixYa.com has become one of the most popular site where free advice is available for fixing most problems with gadgets, home appliances and consumer products.

The site was launched in the year 2005 by Yaniv Ben-Saadon, with the aim of providing relevant and updated support information for consumer products. FixYa witnessed a growth and an overall increase of 400,000 monthly visitors in the span of two years.

FixYa also has an existing partnership with Geek Squad, a subsidiary and technical support division of the software company, Best Buy. The group has launced a comprehensive website which has several features, including troubleshooting and tool fixing guidelines, “How-To” guides and user manuals. The site allows both BestBuy and Geek Squad customers to access a customized version of Fixya, thereby increasing the existing number of contributers and experts and allow customers to help each other out with support issues.

The FixYa site houses technical support, manuals and troubleshooting tips for a variety of electronic products. The site is designed to help users to troubleshoot and fix product problems on their own. Users can have their issues sorted and solved through Internet or telephone. Its Premium Assistance Service program offers several unique features that include the online messaging Premium Live Chat feature, where customers can access immediate and prompt assistance for fixing problem by chatting with technical experts and customer support executives in real time. The company’s site features an aggregation of all support information gathered and stored in a single user friendly location. It offers an extensive and reliable knowledge base which is constantly updated by a live community of users who share their experiences of technical problems and solutions. Through the site’s unique rating system, FixYa allows users to acess fundamental solutions for almost every common problem. The unique and prominent fixture about FixYa’s knowledgebase is that it’s based on the experience of users which offer a forum for new problems. It lays claim as the largest “Support Community” and free “Online Knowledgebase”company in the U.S.

To quote Rami Beracha, managing general partner at Pitango Venture Capital, "Yaniv has exceeded every milestone he set for FixYa because of his team’s ability to respond rapidly to the needs of the FixYa community. We have good reason to believe that the pace of the company’s growth in the multi-billion dollar consumer-support market will continue unabated as more and more consumers make FixYa the go-to place to get help with their product questions.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Venture Capital Funding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.