Arbitrum, a text, image and video moderation service founded by German Gedgauds, who previously headed up Ask.fm’s moderation team and product, has raised $500,000 in funding. Backing the Riga, Latvia-based startup is Balaclava Lab, the investment vehicle of Ask.fm founders Ilja Terebin, Mark Terebin and Oskar Liepins.
That Arbitrum has ties to Ask.fm’s chequered history will raise a few eyebrows given the social Q&A site notoriously ran into user-generated content problems, leading to accusations from parents and the media that the service was a haven for bullies. After IAC acquired Ask.fm, Gedgauds says he was tasked with building moderation functionality that could scale.
“Moderation was indeed a disaster after Ask.fm went viral and traffic was growing extremely fast. At that point all the effort was focused on scaling technically to be able to support the growth, and moderation process was somewhat neglected – which lead…