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Who funded and founded factually.co
Executive Summary
The claim that factually.co was founded and funded by a specific individual or group is unsupported and conflated with multiple similarly named organizations in the provided materials. The documents mix details about Factual (founded by Gil Elbaz), The Factual (a news-rating startup founded by Arjun Moorthy and Ajoy Sojan), and an unspecified “factually.co,” producing no clear, corroborated founding or funding record for factually.co itself [1] [2] [3] [4] [5].
1. Names Collide: Why sources conflate Factual, The Factual, and “factually.co”
The documents demonstrate three distinct entities repeatedly confused: Factual (an open-data company associated with Gil Elbaz), The Factual (a news-credibility startup co-founded by Arjun Moorthy and Ajoy Sojan), and an unnamed reference to factually.co that lacks identifying details. The first source attributes founding of Factual to Gil Elbaz and details early funding activity, including self-funding and later venture capital rounds with investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures [1] [2]. Other documents name Arjun Moorthy and Ajoy Sojan as co-founders of The Factual and note its acquisition by Yahoo in 2022, plus investor mentions such as Defy and Bantam Group, but none of these materials explicitly tie either Gil Elbaz or Moorthy/Sojan to a domain called factually.co [3] [6] [5]. The overlap in names and mission space—data, credibility, and news—creates systematic ambiguity in the records.
2. The Gil Elbaz Track: Clear record for Factual, not factually.co
The materials linking Gil Elbaz document a clear founder narrative and funding history for Factual, an open-data platform launched in 2008, reporting initial self-funding followed by more than $27 million from venture and angel investors; named investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures [1] [2]. Those sources emphasize Elbaz’s prior entrepreneurial background and the company’s mission around structured, shareable data. However, the texts stop short of saying Elbaz founded anything called factually.co, and the wording instead refers to factual.com or Factual, indicating a naming mismatch rather than contradictory founding claims [1] [2]. Thus, while the Elbaz/Factual record is documented, it does not establish a factual link to the domain factually.co.
3. The Moorthy/Sojan Story: The Factual’s founding and exit, still not “factually.co”
Separate documents identify Arjun Moorthy and Ajoy Sojan as co-founders of The Factual, a news-rating and aggregation platform founded around 2016–2019, which subsequently attracted institutional backers and was acquired by Yahoo in August/September 2022. These sources describe The Factual’s mission to assess news credibility and mention investors such as Defy and Bantam Group in profiles dated 2023 and 2025, yet none of these references assert the company operated as factually.co [3] [6] [5]. The presence of acquisition details and investor names establishes a verifiable lineage for The Factual, but it remains distinct from the entity named in the question.
4. Funding Records: What the documents confirm and what they omit
Across the provided materials, funding details exist for Factual (Elbaz) and for The Factual (Moorthy/Sojan) at varying levels of specificity. Factual reportedly raised multiple rounds totaling tens of millions, including a detailed Series C in 2018 per one profile that lists investors like Upfront Ventures and Felicis Ventures [4]. The Factual’s profile references institutional investors and eventual acquisition by Yahoo but leaves precise early-stage funding amounts unclear [6] [5]. Crucially, none of the supplied analyses provide a funding trail for a company explicitly called factually.co, leaving that specific entity’s backers and founding personnel unverified by these materials [1] [7] [8].
5. What to conclude and the remaining gaps for verification
Given the supplied documents, the only defensible conclusion is that the claim “Who funded and founded factually.co” cannot be confirmed: the materials repeatedly conflate similarly named organizations and include explicit founder/funding records only for Factual (Gil Elbaz) and The Factual (Arjun Moorthy and Ajoy Sojan). The absence of any direct mention of factually.co’s founding team or investors in these sources leaves the question unanswered by available evidence [1] [3] [4] [5]. To close the gap, one needs an authoritative corporate filing or a primary source (company About page, domain WHOIS, legal incorporation documents, or press coverage) that specifically identifies factually.co’s founders and funding, material that is not present in the provided set [7] [8].