Briefs

"Venture Capital: Aiming to establish mobile search"

By JOHN COOK, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Brian Lent could have been an Internet billionaire by now. As a graduate student in Stanford University's computer science department in the mid-1990s, Lent worked side-by-side with the founders of Google and Yahoo! as they tried to come up with new technologies to search the Web.

But while Lent missed out on those two home runs, the 35-year-old entrepreneur believes he has stumbled upon what could be a much bigger opportunity: bringing Internet search to the mobile phone.

Today, Lent's 17-month-old mobile search startup -- Seattle-based Medio Systems -- plans to announce $11 million in venture capital financing from Frazier Technology Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Dot Edu Ventures and others. The money will be used to grow the business, which now consists of about 40 employees at the headquarters in the Bank of America Tower and offices overseas.

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In 1994, Lent hooked up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin to create Mining Data at Stanford -- the laboratory that spawned the wildly successful search engine.

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