BestVendor lands $3M for app recommendation site

It's a business directory meets social network meets recommendation engine

Fresh off the heels from raising $600,000 in seed funding in June, NY-based BestVendor, which started this past January, announced that it's raised $3 million in Series A funding, co-led by RRE Ventures and SoftBank Capital. Existing investors who participated in the seed round, including Lerer Ventures, David Tisch, Founder Collective, and Old Willow Partners, also joined this round.

"There's Yelp to figure out which restaurants to go to, and there's Amazon for books," said Jeff Giesea co-founder and CEO, in an interview. "But when it comes to business stuff, there's fragmented directories, and no one place where you can quickly benefit from reviews of others." 

BestVendor is a go-to resource for small- to -medium-sized businesses looking for reviews about business applications and services. While there a lot of directories out there to find what small businesses are interested in, there's no real dominant directory for applications and services, like Hipchat, reading.am, Reeder, Amazon EC2, etc.

The service is super easy to use. Just sign up (using your LinkedIn account) and then type in your favorite apps. Then you can browse through and see who's using which apps and what they've said about them. 

When procuring an application, "the first thing people want to know when they figure out what to buy, is what are people I know using?... We're making it easy to benefit from the experience of others," said Glesea. "Essentially, BestVendor is one part directory, one part social network and one part social network."