As previously rumored, Aggregate Knowledge closed a second round of financing earlier this year – $20 million to add to their previous $5 million round from Kleiner Perkins and First Round Capital. DAG Ventures led this new round, and Kleiner also participated.
The company works with content and ecommerce sites to provide personalized recommendations to page views and/or sales. The word in Silicon Valley is that they are doing one hell of a job for their partners, which include the Washington Post and Overstock.com. The company has fifteen partners to date, with more than 50 million uses between them.
Later this year the company says they will launch a new product, called Collective Discovery, that brings discovery cross-partner.
The company is also rumored to be at or near profitability, with most of the original $5 million investment still in the bank. This new round signals that they are planning a significant ramp up in operations.
When’s yahoo going to grab this?
-Zaid
Love companies like this. No room for hype, all they can sell is their track record, which is apparently pretty nice.
Is there an easy way to view what they actually do? Like ‘go to Overstock, check out such and such, and you’ll see such and such’. Just curious.
HI Direct Textbooks, well I feel your frustration. I had the same problem when I tried to implement or even just figure out there AG’s sevice, I ended up going with http://www.loomia.com, seriously I had it working in about an hour, where AG say’s it take 2 weeks.
——————-
http://www.aggr...ices/media.html
Getting Started
* Available as a Web 2.0 service.
* Installs in less than 2 weeks.
* Free trial for qualified customers.
——————-
The feedback I have gotten from my customers is amazing. We use the Loomia service to create restaurant recommendations. You can see it in full action at http://sfSurvey.com, which is the largest restaurant review resource ever created for San Francisco, with over 18,000 reviews that help people find great food. Loomia added a dimension to our business that I never considered.
“discovery” will eventually prove to be more important and valuable than “search”. If Aggregate Knowledge has cracked that code, then expect them to be huge.
To answer one of the questions about how to check it out:
1. Go to Overstock – click on a product any product. (I’d put a link here but I think that is blocking my comment from posting.)
2. Look at the Discovery Window on the right labeled “People who viewed this also viewed” – that’s us.
If anyone here has a site that would like to try it out please drop us an email through our website – http://www.aggr...teknowledge.com
wow great – sign for a company; but could’nt use the 5 million before getting 25 more?
– I think they are getting too much capitol – if your doing as good as people believe ”they” are doing … you can get funding whenever you want it – so why not get it when you need it ?
-
RB
Does anyone know who their big clients are?
Congrats on the funding Chris – you should consider supporting APML – http://www.apml.org
Looks like DAG have been doing some nice investments:
- Zimbra
- SpikeSource
- Podshow
and now Aggregate Knowledge
Last year on Gillmor Gang when discussing PodShow’s round of financing I think Arrington’s comment was “who’s DAG?”, looks like they might be moving up but maybe they might need more series A rounds…
Def congrats to both Chris and Paul … they both deserve it.
I don’t understand why they’d raise $25 when they still have most of the $5 in the bank.
Spend the $5 first and raise the $25 on a higher valuation.
You really can’t spent $5M that fast without destroying the companies culture and hurting long term prospect anyway.
Then again I tend to be conservative in these areas.
Onward!
I agree with Kevin. If AK is really near profitability and the $5M still in the bank, why do they need to raise another $20M? Looks like this time Mike didn’t do his homework before posting this strange rumor.
Aggregate Knowledge has one big skill: buzz, buzz, buzz. According to all competitors, AK’s technology is pretty loosy. Did AK participate into Netflix Prize? No! Too afraid to test their engine against some serious algorithms.
AK claims to have fifteen partners to date? Well, none of them are quoted on their web site! Why do they hide their partnerships? Afraid that we discover that most of them are not implemented?
AK is likely to follow the same path than Choicestream: burning a lot of cash for very limited achievements.
I would like to address a few of the comments here.
The round is not a rumor, it is now closed and you can read the press release on our website here.
http://www.aggr...news/index.html
If you would like to read some of our partner quotes you can look at the links below. They include Overstock (the 18th largest retailer on the planet) and the Washington Post (one of the most respected news brands in the world).
http://www.aggr..._overstock.html
http://www.aggr...s/pr/index.html
Also, many of our customers are able to get the product up and running in 1 hour. But since our clients are some of the largest websites on the entire web the, 2-week window is required because of UI approvals, pushes to staging, QA verification, then push to production. The integration is as easy as adding a few lines of JavaScript to a page, but when you are doing 20-50m page views a day on your site, its not like just editing the gutter of a blog. They’re quite a few steps to ensure accuracy.
As for spending (and to Kevin’s point about culture) — raising the money is to expand as we have demonstrated results for our customers. The culture of the company is firmly in place and we will be working very diligently to retain it during our growth phase. I do appreciate Kevin’s comment and take it to heart.
Paul Martino
CEO
Aggregate Knowledge
Interesting that Baynote, (developer of software that “delivers product recommendations, content suggestions,” etc.) also raised more funds last week, 10.5 M.
Anyone know how similar AK and Baynote are?
Looks like washingtonpost.com is using another service altogether:
http://www.inform.com/
‘Powered by Inform’ is printed beneath the module under all of their stories that identifies related content.
Aggregate Knowledge is an example of a company providing real value to its customers. While consumer-facing web apps get the majority of the press/buzz, Aggregate Knowledge is generating real returns. Unlike pageviews, that’s a pretty good indicator of a viable and sustainable business model. More at http://foroobar...o-expand-sales/
“Did AK participate into Netflix Prize? No! Too afraid to test their engine against some serious algorithms.”
This is a non sequitor.
Tailrank didn’t partitipate in the Netflix prize. It’s better to focus on customers. It’s actually a LOT more probable that you’ll close a few customer for 1M in sales than win a contest with arbitrary judges and rules.
That said……. I think the Netflix prize is great but it’s just not a revenue stream.
Also…. real customers renew….. if you close 1M in sales for this year they might be customers for the next 5 years.
We’ve been using Spotback’s new widgets on our blog http://www.theplugg.com and it’s done wonders to our page views and visit length. Seems like perosnalized recommendations work.
I really don’t see the point of paying money for a service like this when Spotback is absolutely free.. Try it: http://spotback.com
25M?! Nice job guys..
“It’s actually a LOT more probable that you’ll close a few customer for 1M in sales than win a contest with arbitrary judges and rules”
Kevin, are you on AK payroll?! The Netflix prize is absolutly not with arbitrary rules. Actually, it is quite the opposite. The accuracy of each algorithm is calculated with the same sample of data. No way to cheat.
For details, you can check it at: http://www.netf...prize.com/rules
For a company like AK, it would require just a couple of hours of work to process the data of Netflix (well obviously, if they have the scalability they claim to have). If AK had the proper algorithm, they wouldn’t refuse this easy money, say nothing of the great promotion associated.
I just posted an interview with Chris Law, one of the founders of Aggregate Knowledge at http://www.StartupStudio.com. It was recorded a couple weeks ago.
Chris answers many of the questions that people have brought up here as well as other things I find interesting:
* What is the long term network vision for the company (18:38)
* Where the company is going — online is a great start, but offline holds a lot of opportunity (19:40).
* How Aggregate Knowledge is able to implement their technology so quickly (16:36)
* Why it has taken so long for this technology to be available/used widely given that Amazon has been doing something similar for years (15:41)