Retrevo, electronic product shopping site, raises $8M
Retrevo, the Silicon Valley company that helps you shop electronic products, and then helps you after the purchase (with troubleshooting tips), has raised $8 million more in a second round of financing.
We reported on the company’s first fundings, which totaled $3.9 million (see our coverage here and here), and then later on its release of a set of useful comparison features. Retrevo now offers a great overview of a category of products. For example, if you choose mobile phones, it gives you a way to select them based on value, taking into account their price and features. It provides an overall sentiment rating for each product, which also takes into account user reviews.
We wrote before that it has joined a very crowded field, and today it remains as crowded as ever. Retrevo thinks its offer to help you find a way to troubleshoot a product after you buy will make it stand out. But is that enough to get it noticed, and to make money? It’s too early to say. Chief executive Vipin Jain says he aims to break even next year, from ads, but also from referral fees. He won’t say how much traffic the site has, but says traffic has quadrupled in the last year.
The round was led by Alloy Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
