RichRelevance Closes Over-subscribed Round with $8 Million in Additional Financing
Additional investment from RTP Ventures, Shea Ventures and Gray Ventures completes $28 million round
San Francisco, CA – Aug. 14, 2012 –– RichRelevance®, the leading provider of dynamic personalization for the world’s largest retailers and brands, today announced that it has closed an additional $8 million in venture capital financing from RTP Ventures, Shea Ventures and Gray Ventures, as well as from existing investor Tugboat Ventures. This financing completes RichRelevance’s $28 million round which also includes investment from Greylock Partners, Crosslink Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company will use this round to drive continued investment in its infrastructure and technology to support new product innovations and global expansion.
“RichRelevance has been at the forefront of how shifting consumer behavior impacts retail and we are uniquely equipped to help our partners evolve in this rapidly changing landscape,” said David Selinger, founder and CEO RichRelevance. “Our strategy of combining best-in-class product, an excellent sales organization, and a standout service model is proving to be differentiated and highly successful. We will use this funding to continue to grow our footprint while relentlessly expanding our value creation for our existing clients.”
Developed by the architects of Amazon.com’s recommendation technology, RichRelevance allows retailers to deliver dynamic, tailored experiences that put the customers at the center of retail strategy. Six of the top 10 internet retail chains choose RichRelevance as their personalization provider and the company serves more than 850 million product recommendations daily. This means consumers click on a RichRelevance recommendation every 21 milliseconds—all delivered with an average round-trip-to- consumer latency of under 70 milliseconds (faster than you can say “Wow, that’s really fast!”). The company consistently innovates new personalization solutions that allow retailers to monetize every pixel of their sites through product recommendations, targeted promotions and advertising. Through its services, RichRelevance has delivered more than $5.5 billion in sales for its retail clients.
In addition, RichRelevance offers a groundbreaking Shopping Media suite for brand advertisers. Launched in December 2010, RichRelevance’s advertising offerings are used by leading brands to engage shoppers on the world’s largest retail sites with custom content while they are researching and purchasing products. RichRelevance’s Shopping Media campaigns yield significantly higher engagement rates — double that of traditional rich media ads — and deliver a 60-100% sales lift for the advertised brand’s products. The company recently appointed AOL/Time Warner veteran and former publisher of Rolling Stone, Jack Rotherham, as SVP of Shopping Media Sales and Partnerships.
“We have entered a new economy where the largest forces shaping retail are big data and cloud computing,” said Kirill Sheynkman, Senior Managing Director at RTP Ventures. “RichRelevance’s team, platform and product suite place them in the center of the future of shopping and brand engagement. We’re extremely excited about RichRelevance’s path forward as they continue to innovate new markets and new products, better serving retailers, brand advertisers and consumers.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance delivers over 850 million product recommendations daily, powering the personalized shopping experiences for consumers shopping the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands like Walmart, Sears, Target, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $5.5 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called Shopping Media which allows brands to engage consumers where it matters most—in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.
