Today, Knotch, the consumer-facing data company focused on connecting like-minded people, announced that up to date they have raised a total of $1.9 million in funding.

The company, a StartX alum, recently closed an oversubscribed round of $1.5 million. Michael and Xochi Birch (founders of Bebo) led the round with participation from virality experts Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier, Lars Rasmussen (founder of Google Maps), Ed Baker (Head of Growth at Uber), Avie Tevanian (former Apple CTO), Alan Braverman (founder of Geni/Yammer), David Bettner (founder of Words With Friends, etc.), Greylock, Lightspeed Ventures and Interwest also participated in the round, together with Stanford University through the Stanford - StartX Fund.

Knotch is a simple way to capture your thoughts and share them with others. Moreover, it is the first network to focus not on who you know or how you look but on your 'true colors'. Your identity on Knotch is determined by a collection of your interests, thoughts and opinions and it is at the core of how you interact and connect with other like-minded users, usually from outside your social graph.

The Knotch community, already engaged in conversations around more than 250,000 knotches, say that their favorite part about the iPhone app is the Knotch Color Spectrum, the central part of the app that knotchers use to color-code their sentiment (red meaning positive, blue meaning negative sentiment). 'The colors make it so easy, fun and quick to share my thoughts on the latest episode of Homeland, Obamacare or MIley Cyrus' latest song,' says Melody, a 26-year old user from Tampa, Florida.

Today, the company launched an updated iPhone app, Knotch 1.5, featured by Apple as one of the Best New Apps in the Social Networking category. The Knotch 1.5 update features a seamless onboarding process and a new feed experience that allows users to separate between the people they follow and the topics they follow. The new feed experience allows a 'knotcher' to keep up with both how the community feels about relevant topics and the people they are most interested in.

As for priorities going forward, growth is a major focus of 2014 for Knotch but it 'needs to be preceded by a high-quality product that will not fall as a victim to the consumer app ADD so common today. Building something that grows and sticks around is hard and that is what we are aiming for. The incredible line up of supporters that have rallied behind us are putting us in a great position to achieve that,' says co-founder and CEO, Anda Gansca.

Founders Anda Gansca and Stephanie Volftsun have already employed the funds: over the past two months they hired a team of engineers wooed from Facebook, Intel and Chartboost. In the coming months, Knotch is rolling out a web version of the product and releasing a solution for media companies to integrate with.

Knotch has always called itself a consumer-facing data company but it was not until recently that it started showing the world what it can do with the data it gathers. In past month, the company started pushing infographics to its blog: http://knotchworthy.tumblr.com/. This spiked the interest of a number of media companies who are looking to adopt the Knotch Color Spectrum as a quick feedback mechanism between reader/viewer and content. Stephanie Volftsun, Knotch co-founder and CTO, says that the team has always been passionate about building a product at the intersection of consumer and data.

'Social media users have no outlet for measurable and impactful self-expression. On the other hand, the sentiment data industry has settled for a meager standard of 60% accuracy for understanding sentiment, slightly better than a random guess. Knotch fills the voids on both ends,' says Volftsun.

Avadis Tevanian, Managing Director, Elevation Partners says, 'Knotch's data is more reliable than trying to mine unstructured data,' from other social networks and that it could eventually become useful to brands, artists and even politicians.