Anthony Ha of TechCrunch reports that the latest venture from Powerset founder Steve Newcomb has raised $4 million in Series A funding. Ha writes, “Famo.us, which offers a JavaScript framework that’s designed to power HTML5 apps that are faster and better-looking than what’s currently possible, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by previous investor Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from ‘one or more’ hardware vendors (whose name or names aren’t being shared publicly). The company is led by Steve Newcomb, who previously co-founded Powerset, the semantic search startup acquired by Microsoft for $100 million. It actually launched at our Disrupt conference in San Francisco last fall. When I spoke to him about the funding, Newcomb admitted that his Disrupt presentation wasn’t exactly an overwhelming success, and that he faced some skepticism and confusing from the judges.”

He continues, “One reason Newcomb may not have had all the answers — supposedly, the conference came only three days after his decision with co-founder Mark Lu to shift the company’s focus. Originally, Newcomb said he had wanted to build what was, essentially, a Pinterest clone, but with vastly improved design. However, the team discovered that HTML5 could not deliver the experience that they were looking for. The real issue, Newcomb said, was in the basic design of web browsers, which were built to render documents, not apps. And when it comes to rendering, while ‘the web got it wrong from the beginning,’ the team realized that the gaming industry got it right.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Famo.us