Qwiki, a startup pioneering the transformation of data into rich-media narratives, today announced an accumulated series A funding round of $8 million, with a total of $9.5 million worth of funds, taking into account its angel fund.

“The public’s enthusiasm for Qwiki after our debut at TechCrunch Disrupt demonstrates the incredible opportunity ahead of us,” says CEO Doug Imbruce. “Our new financial partners will help provide the resources, independence and strategic know-how to grow Qwiki to the next level and forever improve the way the world consumes information.”

The round was led by a number of prominent individual investors including Eduardo Saverin (co-founder, Facebook), Jawed Karim (co-founder, YouTube) and Pradeep Sindhu (co-founder, Juniper Networks), as well as institutional investors Lerer Media Ventures, Tugboat Ventures and Contour Venture Partners. Saverin and Pejman will join Qwiki’s Board of Directors.

The new funding will fuel Qwiki’s technology development, which will be followed by a public launch on various platforms. The success of Qwiki’s invite-only private Alpha of its reference products, which has signed up hundreds of thousands of users, is good cause for the latest funding round.

From investors:

“Qwiki is a revolutionary new platform that will define the future of information consumption globally,” said Eduardo Saverin. “I’m particularly excited to support the Qwiki team as their initial product gains momentum. It is always thrilling to be involved in the early stages of disruptive technology.”

“Qwiki is a game changer,” says Jawed Karim. “The team has succeeded in creating an entirely new media format that will drastically improve the web experience.”

Eduardo Saverin is more prominently known as one of the co-founders of Facebook, with whom Mark Zuckerberg has had some heavy legal battles. He was the former Chief Financial officer of the social media giant and lost much of his shares due to som interesting technicalities. This phase of Facebook’s history was accounted in the controversial Hollywood movie, “The Social Network”. Also, a review by one of our writers, Kit Dotson, says that Eduardo Saverin is actually a lot less entertaining than was portrayed by Andrew Garfield in the movie. And here’s another one from Arthur Lindsey about the movie itself.