Criteo, a personalized advertising startup with a unique strategy for recapturing lost customers, announced on Thursday that it has secured a $7 million third round of funding from Bessemer Venture Partners. Since 2006, the company has raised a total of $24 million from AGF Private Equity, Elaia Partners, and Index Ventures. Bessemer partner Byron Deeter will be joining Criteo’s board.
The “personalized retargeting” technology of Criteo works by remembering visitors that leave a retail site without making a purchase. Those users will then immediately see advertising from that same retailer whenever they navigate to another site with ads. Advertisers are charged cost-per-click.
“We see on average someone needs to visit 5 times before buying anything,” says CEO JB Rudelle. “We show them in the banner either exactly the product they were looking at or similar product they are likely to buy or complementary products.”
Though Criteo is far from the only company employing this kind of ad tactic, Rudelle says his company is the dominant retargeting ad network in Europe and is looking to fill that same role stateside.
The company even relocated to the Palo Alto recently from its original corporate base in Paris.
Criteo, already profitable, says it will use the new funding to fuel growth in the U.S., to backup the current infrastructure, and to construct more data centers. The company, which currently oversees two large data centers domestically, employs 140 people around the world.
