Criteo raises $7M Series C from Bessemer

Ronny Kerr · May 7, 2010 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/f85

Personalized advertising startup recaptures consumers that leave a site without making a purchase

CriteoCriteo, 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.
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Criteo is all about pushing the right item to the right person at the right time and on the right web page.

With already millions of highly targeted real-time personalized recommendations served to thousands of websites, Criteo aims to become the most widely used real-time personalized recommendation solution on the web.

Personalization can help discover information one would not have found on his own, sites one never knew existed, based on users past behaviors and interests. Personalization and recommendations aid discovery. Discovery is about leveraging the long tail of huge catalogs that would be extremely difficult for a user to browse. It's hard to find something if you didn't know it existed. It's even harder to find something if you can't easily define exactly what you are looking for.

Criteo uses a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Our solutions are available for any web site, based on plug-and-play web components. It's an easy installation with no hassles. It does not require any kind of long term commitment nor advanced technical skills. Thanks to its transparency and efficiency, Criteo solutions have attracted thousands of clients of all sizes.

 

What's the 'Big Idea' behind Criteo?

There will always be much more to browse than anyone can possibly swallow. Consider a typical movie catalog: it has more than 80,000 products! Filtering is getting critical to extract the relevant products for each of us from those giant catalogues.

Our past browsing history is the best proxy of our future browsing and purchases. It is much more relevant than our gender, age or occupation. We believe the Criteo solution is providing by far the best accuracy in recommending content and products to users.

Most recommendation systems found on web sites show very disappointing efficiency. It's because it's a very complex technology. Only rare true experts like Criteo can provide best-in-class solutions.

Criteo's algorithm is based on analyzing of millions of statistical events. No single individual can fool the system.

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