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The headline may appear a bit personal, and, well, it is. I come from Siberia and I can’t cheer enough a fellow female entrepreneur from my hometown, who is building a global startup and has just raised funding.

Now the hard facts.

LikeHack is a personalized news delivery service, and before you tell me that there are so many solutions on the market already, look at this one, because it is simple and makes sense.

St Petersburg-based LikeHack (available in English) has just raised $150,000 from Altair Capital, owned by the Vienna-based angel investor Igor Ryabenkiy. Ryabenkiy has previously invested in LinguaLeo (online English and other online courses) and Gfranq (the cool online photo filter service that I like) amongst others.

Here is why it is better than StumbleUpon, Flipboard / Utopic.me and others, according to Jane Smorodnikova, the founder and yes the fellow Siberian. LikeHack analyses the social media profile information of people who share similar links that you do, and feeds their shares into your newsfeed.

Smorodnikova says that the best links come from people who know what interests you, in real time (that is when you are still interested).

So it is not just your friends, who may be into babies, knitting and stamp collecting, but more importantly colleagues or even complete strangers who may work in your industry, be it chocolate making, fabric designing or even startups. By comparing your profiles and likes, LikeHacker suggests what would interest you. The service also analyses and delivers recommended content in real time, to meet your immediate needs in information, as long as you made them known in your status update, comment or a shared link.

In this case I might get my feeds as abracadabra in CEE languages but this is just what I might need as long as there is Google Translate. That’s blogging about Russia and Eastern Europe!

So far, the company was bootstrapped, as Smorodnikova, who runs the deliciously branded Freshle.com blog, as well as advisor blog for Skolkovo, has vacated Novosibirsk for St. Peterburg to concentrate on LikeHack. The CEO of the startup is Dmitry Yanin, who was involved in the social alarm clock startup TalkAClock (a competitor of Budist / Wakie), backed by the business angel Alexey Kistenev.  The CTO is Michael Kechinov, who runs a software development company, focusing on startups (he is also involved in the Russian startup conference 42Conf and Hackday).

In conclusion, Smorodnikova and I met at Le Web, where I also met another Siberian, the darling of Loic Le Meur Danil Kozyatnikov of Questli (who is now reinventing the dating business with a new startup called MeetCute). LeWeb this year? Oh yes.

Photo Credit: Andrey Maximov

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