BloomReach raked in $ 25 million in new venture funding in a C Series round led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total venture funding to a healthy $ 41 million. The be-all-and-end-all for BloomReach, which emerged from stealth in February, is to help online retailers make the stuff they sell more easily found by would-be buyers so they’ll actually sell more of it.
As BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta told my colleague Derrick Harris early this year, companies don’t know how to show off their product catalogs in a way that best aligns with how customers search. Less than a quarter of web pages get any traffic from natural or paid search in a given month – a problem that will only get worse as the amount of online data grows. They’re products are needles in an ever-expanding haystack. But if they know how people are searching for things and learn how to display their content better to suit that behavior, they can boost discoverability and thus sales.
“Understanding relevance of content to the way people express themselves turns out to be a difficult problem,” De Datta told Harris.
According to the company’s website, its core Web Relevance Engine, which is used by customers including Neiman Marcus Direct, Guess? and Drugstore.com:
analyzes consumer interactions across the web and semantically interprets content on more than one billion web pages daily. The cloud applications powered by the WRE dynamically adapt websites to capture existing consumer demand across search, social and advertising channels — driving relevance and significant incremental revenues across a large customer base including the retail, travel, education, financial and listings industries.
Retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart are reportedly working on similar technologies but they’re not commercially available. BloomReach, Mountain View, Calif., said it will double its sales and marketing efforts and triple its R&D funding to push more into mobile, social and video marketing channels. Current investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Bain Capital also contributed to this round.
