Facebook app Bday Gift Finder launches with $2M in funding

Finding the perfect gift for a friend’s birthday can be tricky. Bday today launched the Bday Gift Finder, a Facebook app that scrapes your friends’ profiles to recommend the perfect presents. And the company has already secured the best gift of all for itself: $2 million in funding.

The Bday Gift Finder is a simple concept. After the app connects to your Facebook profile, it scans and analyzes your friend’s “likes” from top brand pages. You can click on a friend’s profile to see from which retailer, physical or online, they might like a gift. You can use the app to buy the gift, which actually comes in the form of a gift card. (The company doesn’t deliver it for you, you’ll have to go through the retailers website.)

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Bday plans on making money through partnerships with retailers — ideally it will process the gift-card payment directly in Facebook and taking a percentage of the transaction. However, as of right now, the company is simply driving shoppers to the retailers, which may be the first step in proving its relevancy and landing those partnerships.

Numerous Facebook gifting apps have popped up recently, including Giftiki, which focuses on group gift giving based on friends’ gift requests. There are also some outside of Facebook, including GroupGifting which recently launched CoachGifter.com, a way for groups to easily buy gifts for their coaches.

The main differentiator for Bday Gift Finder appears to be its emphasis on sentiment. The company claims that it can tell if a “like” is either positive or negative. For example, if a friend is protesting a brands environmental regulations, then you wouldn’t want to send them a gift card for that brand, because they were “liking” a negative aspect of it. The company says it uses man-power to scan for these types of brand pages and does not include them.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company, founded in 2011, secured the first round of funding from Tel-Ad Electronics Ltd., a technology company in Israel. The financing will be used to further expand Bday’s technology and product portfolio.