Urtak

Urtak is a technology company.

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Updated: Mar 21, 2026 ·

About

Urtak provides a platform for collaborative public opinion, enabling users to engage with content via structured yes/no questions. Its core product is an embeddable website tool, designed to gather and organize audience sentiment efficiently. This approach offers a streamlined alternative to traditional comment sections, distilling collective views into quantifiable data and facilitating interactive feedback.

Founded in 2008 by Marc Lizoain and Aaron Gibralter, Urtak emerged from the insight that online public opinion required better organization. They sought a more effective method for audience engagement than existing digital interactions. Their vision was to establish a dedicated system for structured feedback. The company refined its platform during the TechStars NYC program.

Urtak serves publishers, content creators, and internet users seeking direct, actionable engagement. The platform allows for clear expression and aggregation of audience sentiment. Its vision centers on creating an accessible repository of organized public opinion, offering insights into collective thought. Urtak aims to evolve how online communities contribute to shared understanding.

Recent News & Mentions

Jan 1, 2012FundingUrtak - Seed

Financial History

Urtak has raised $500K across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $500K Seed in January 2012.

Total Raised

$500K

Valuation

N/A

Funding Rounds Raised

Date	Round	Lead Investors	Other Investors
Jan 1, 2012	$500K Seed		Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks Ventures, Rainfall Ventures, RRE Ventures, Joshua Schachter

Financial History

Urtak has raised $500K across 1 funding round.

Total Raised

$500K

Valuation

N/A

Deep Dive

Urtak is a web-based publisher polling and collaborative Q&A widget that lets readers answer short three-choice questions (“Yes”, “No”, “Don’t Care”) and submit questions for other readers, launched by Harvard alumni around 2008 with the goal of organizing “opinion information.”[2][4]

High-Level Overview

Concise summary: Urtak built a lightweight, embeddable polling widget for publishers that emphasized rapid, collaborative polling where users both answer and can propose questions; the product aimed to aggregate structured public opinion at scale.[2][4]- For a portfolio-company style view: Urtak’s mission was to organize the world’s “opinion information.”[2] Urtak’s product philosophy prioritized simple, low-friction engagement (three-answer polls and reader-submitted questions) over long-form responses, targeting news sites, blogs and publishers seeking audience interaction.[2][4] The key sector was online publishing and audience engagement tools, and its impact was to experiment with new, community-driven polling UX and publisher widgets that increased reader participation and generated aggregated opinion datasets for publishers.[2][4]

Origin Story

Founding and founders: Urtak was created around 2008 by Harvard alumni including Marc Lizoain and Aaron Gibralter, who developed the tool over several years before broader public attention.[2][4]- How the idea emerged: The founders framed Urtak as an attempt to “organize the world’s ‘opinion information’” by making it trivially easy for audiences to answer and submit questions embedded in publisher pages.[2]- Early traction / pivotal moments: In 2012 Urtak raised seed funding (~$500K) as coverage by TechCrunch highlighted its unique mechanics (three-answer choices and user-submitted questions) and potential for publishers to generate high volumes of votes and questions; the company explored monetization such as sponsored questions for publishers.[2]

Core Differentiators

Simple three-choice UX: Answers limited to “Yes”, “No”, or “Don’t Care” lowered friction and sped voting, creating rapid aggregate opinion snapshots.[2]- Collaborative question creation: Readers could propose questions that—after publisher approval—would be presented to other users, enabling organic topic discovery and community-driven polling.[2][4]- Publisher-embedded widget model: Lightweight embeddable widget allowed publishers to place interactive polling directly inside articles to drive engagement without heavy integration.[2][4]- Focus on aggregated “opinion information”: Framing the product as building a structured corpus of public opinion distinguished it from one-off polls or standard survey tools.[2]

Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

Trend alignment: Urtak rode the trends of real-time audience engagement, social publishing widgets, and lightweight interaction models that characterized late-2000s/early-2010s web products.[2][4]- Timing and market forces: As publishers sought new engagement tools and metrics in the era of declining attention, a frictionless polling widget that could rapidly collect reader sentiment fit market demand for interactive content and user-generated questions.[2]- Influence: Urtak demonstrated an alternative model for publisher engagement—community-sourced questions and ultra-simple responses—that influenced thinking about collaborative polling and lightweight feedback widgets even if larger poll/survey platforms dominated monetization and scale.[2][4]

Quick Take & Future Outlook

Short-term prospects (historical view): At the time of its 2012 funding and press coverage, Urtak’s next steps included scaling publisher adoption and testing monetization such as sponsored questions to become sustainable.[2]- Longer-term outlook / trends that would matter: Continued interest in low-friction engagement, privacy-aware data collection, and platforms that turn ephemeral interactions into analyzable opinion datasets would determine whether a widget like Urtak could evolve into a broader analytics product or be subsumed by larger platforms offering polls and comments as part of broader CMS and social ecosystems.[2][4]- Final thought: Urtak’s value proposition — making it extremely easy for audiences to answer and ask short structured questions — was its clearest differentiator and legacy contribution to publisher engagement UX, even as competitive and monetization pressures shaped its trajectory.[2][4]

Sources cited above: TechCrunch coverage of Urtak’s product and funding[2]; contemporaneous reporting and product descriptions from The Next Web and related industry write-ups describing the collaborative polling model and publisher focus[4].

Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

How much funding has Urtak raised?

Urtak has raised $500K in total across 1 funding round.

Who are Urtak's investors?

Urtak's investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks Ventures, Rainfall Ventures, RRE Ventures, Joshua Schachter.