The article makes it sound like a "whiz kid loner" sort of company, but the summly.com website suggests there's a lot more to it than is implied by this article

The article makes it sound like a "whiz kid loner" sort of company, but the summly.com website suggests there's a lot more to it than is implied by this article. The About page shows a pretty senior, experienced team (decades of engineering and research experience): http://summly.com/about.html http://summly.com/about.html And the technology page says the algorithm is actually from SRI! http://summly.com/technology.html http://summly.com/technology.html (SRI language technology was also behind Siri, of course.) There are various NLP researchers on their SRI team list, like Appelt, Israel, Nallapati, etc. Did Summly license the technology from SRI? Did they contract with SRI to maintain or develop the core algorithm? Who owns it? If the valuation includes Yahoo acquiring SRI technology, IP, and some portion of those researchers' time for futher product development, plus the very nice UI and marketing for it, and maybe they want to acquihire some of the team as well, that all makes the valuation seem a bit less far-fetched than you might think from the NYT's coverage (or the negative comments on HN). The more interesting question than the valuation, I think, is how this company went from a very young founder to all those investors, a pretty senior executive team, and getting the NLP technology. [I once worked for a startup, Powerset, whose core NLP system was licensed from Xerox PARC; Powerset also quietly acquired an SRI spinoff and its NLP technology, and I think IP acquisition was an important motivation. When Powerset was acquired by Microsoft, I am told IP was at least a somewhat important part of the valuation. I have no idea if this is actually applicable to this situation; maybe it's an overextrapolation.]