MyBuys secures $20M for personalized shopping

The company gets funding from Rho Ventures

MyBuys, a personalized advertising company for brands and retailers, on Friday announced the close of a $20 million Series C round of funding led by Rho Ventures, with help from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures. This brings the company's total raised since its creation in 2006 to $32.8 million. 

The funding comes on the heels of MyBuys' announcement that in 2010, it doubled its 2009 revenue and brought on 225 new clients so that it now serves more than 300 companies, including Lancôme, Skechers, Golf Galaxy and Karmaloop. So what is MyBuys doing to draw such big names to its service? The company provides a personalized shopping service for brands and retailers based on "deep consumer preference profiles." In other words, the service examines consumer behavior, purchasing history, and stated preferences, and then applies this to different shopping scenarios, including what the shopper is doing at the moment, his/her price affinity, products that the merchant is offering, as well as merchant events.

The service accounts for the fact that every retailer has its own set of customers--the customers that buy from one retailer might be more focused on price than brand, while the customers of another retailer might be more focused on brand than anything else, and making recommendations outside of the customer's preferred brand wouldn't do any good. 

It then makes personalized recommendations specific to individual shoppers through the retailers' website, email shopping alerts, and mobile alerts. It claims to increase customer conversion rates by 90%. 

"We were impressed with MyBuys' expanding customer base, strong revenue and unique-integrated personalization offerings. Not only are they well positioned to provide incremental revenue for their clients, but they also have an impressive vision for the future of personalization and the right team to make it happen," said Rho Ventures partner Paul Bartlett in a prepared statement.

MyBuys plans to use the new funds to boost adoption and development. 

Image source: MyBuys.com