A company called Milo.com wants to stand out from the hordes of e-commerce sites by providing users with information about what’s on the shelves of local stores. Investors just backed this mission with a $4 million first round.
That’s a respectable amount, but more impressive than the sum is who’s providing it. True Ventures led the round, while a number of high-profile angel investors also participated, including Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, Ron Conway of SV Angel, Mint.com founder and Intuit General Manager of Personal Finance Aaron Patzer, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, and several others. (Senkut is an investor in VentureBeat.)
Jack Abraham, the Palo Alto, Calif. company’s founder and chief executive, said investors responded to “the giant market and red-hot growth.” While there are online retailers that also provide up-to-date information about what’s available in brick-and-mortar stores, Milo.com is the only site gathering all that data and making it easy for a shopper to search for an item, see which local stores they can currently buy it from, and for how much, Abraham said. And because those stores are feeling pressure from consumers to provide inventory information that’s as up-to-date as possible on their web sites, the data on Milo.com is also pretty accurate.
Milo.com launched in December 2008, its traffic has been growing by about 70 percent every month, and it’s on-track to top 1 million users this month, Abraham said. As far as the opportunity for future growth, he pointed to a Forrester study from 2007 showing that “cross-channel” sales, where users do their research online, then go to a physical store to make their purchase, will actually grow more quickly than online retail.
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“So e-commerce is growing, but this is actually a market that’s growing faster, and is much bigger,” Abraham said.
Here are the other angel investors who participated in the round:
- Magid Abraham, comScore
- Harris Barton, former 49er
- Chris Dixon, Hunch, SiteAdvisor
- Russ Fradin, Adify
- Kevin Hartz, Eventbrite, Xoom, ConnectGroup
- Jawed Karim, YouTube
- Len Lodish, The Wharton School
- Keith Rabois, Slide, PayPal, Yelp, LinkedIn, YouTube
- Maurice Werdegar, Western Technology Investments
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