MyThings raises $6M for personalized ads

The company is backed by T-Venture, Accel, and Carmel

MyThings, a personalized retargeting platform with London, Paris, and Tel Aviv, announced Tuesday that it has raised $6 million in its third round of funding led by T-Venture, with participation from Accel Partners, Carmel Ventures, Dot Corp, and GP Bullhound.  This brings the company’s total funds raised to $19 million.

Founded in 2005, the company has developed a unique personalized display advertising solution that it claims can increase return conversion rates by more than 500%.  Essentially, when a Web user visits a website that uses myThings’ solution, they are assigned a unique cookie.  Later, when that user visits other pages in an ad network site, myThings identifies the individual and uses anonymous aggregated data to displays ads most likely to appeal to that user.  The company creates a custom-made banner featuring product data and pricing from your website that will then be served to individual users as their personalized “shopping windows.”

Other myThings features include myAudience, which targets the potential customers that got away, and myOptimizer maximizes relevancy by choosing the product or service most likely to appeal to individual users.

A hit in Europe, myThings’ clients include Price Minister, Republic, and PIXMania, among others.

"With user intent driving the growth in online marketing, myThings technology is enabling our clients to retarget based on user intent and improve the performance of their campaigns,” said myThings CEO and founder, Benny Arbel, in a prepared statement.  "This round of funding will be used to scale our sales, marketing and R&D operations throughout Europe, to meet client and market growth.”

T-Venture, which led the latest round of funding, is the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, a German telecommunications company whose Web properties see 27 million unique monthly visitors. 

"What impressed us with myThings is the company's technology, which generates significant increases in return conversation rates in a retargeting market which is growing exponentially in Europe, as well as the responsiveness of the entire myThings team," said Frank Bachér, Managing Director of the Deutsche Telekom-owned InteractiveMedia, in the announcement.

MyThings maintains that its solutions are anonymous and do not collect sensitive information about users.  In 2010, myThings was awarded TRUSTe’s Privacy Seal.

Interestingly, it appears that myThings originated in 2005 as a social network-type site to allow users to organize their "things" (i.e. treasures and knick-knacks) online, providing features like valuation, manuals, repair info, and even a one-click sell-on-eBay feature. 

Image source: myThings.com