Shares of Answers Corporation soared Tuesday after Redpoint Ventures agreed to inject up to $13 million in a private placement.

Shares of New York City-based Answers, parent of the Answers.com and WikiAnswers.com web sites, climbed $.30, or 7.7 percent, to $4.22 in late morning trading, though they were still far short of their 52-week high of $13.40.

On Monday, Redpoint paid $6 million for a package of series A preferred shares convertible into 1.3 million shares of common stock at a price of $4.50 per share. The deal, announced Tuesday, also lets Redpoint pay up to $7 million over the next 12 months for preferred stock convertible into 1.3 million shares of common at a price of $5.50 per share.

Both parts of the convertible stock deals also provide Redpoint with warrants for half the number of common shares at conversion prices of $4.95 and $6.05 per share.

If fully exercised, including warrants, the deal would give Redpoint, based in Menlo Park, California, about 12 percent of Answers’ 32.1 million shares outstanding.

Redpoint partner Allen Beasley will join Answers’ board of directors and the venture firm will be eligible to name a second director if it exercises the second tranche warrant and meets other requirements.

In a news release, Answers’ Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Rosenchein cited a previous investment by Redpoint in a public company. That was a stake in Intermix, the parent of No. 1 social network MySpace, which was sold to News Corp. for $580 million in 2006.

In a statement, Mr. Beasley cited Answers’ WikiAnswers.com site as “the type of high growth opportunity we look for” with 11 million monthly unique visitors in May, according to comScore.

For the three months ended March 31, advertising revenue at Answers.com, the company’s other major online property, fell from $2.8 million in the 2007 quarter to $1.8 million. Ad revenue at WikiAnswers.com, however, grew from $116,000 to $1.2 million.

Answers, founded in 1999 as GuruNet, leans heavily on search engines for traffic flow. Answers.com took a hit in July when Google altered its search engine algorithm, causing a 28 percent drop in traffic and proportional decline in revenue.

The company has been seeking to lessen that dependence by creating widgets and browser add-ons that direct users to its reference service without going through a search engine.

In 2007, the company also offered to buy Lexico Publishing Group, parent of dictionary.com, thesaurus.com and reference.com, for $100 million, but that deal collapsed when Answers Corporation could not raise the funds. In May, Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp stepped in and snapped up Lexico for an undisclosed price.