Decide.com scoops up $8M from Vulcan Capital & others to further combine ‘big data’ & shopping

Online shopping startup Decide.com has raised $8 million in its third round of funding so it can continue to help consumers find the best site and time to buy products using “big data.”

Seattle-based Decide.com claims to sift through more than 230 terabytes of data to find the best-rated products from every major retailer in the United Sates. Maybe more importantly, it also uses that data to predict future prices on 1.6 million products so you can choose the best time to buy. The company started assigning a “Decide Score” to products last July to make the experience better.

“Our goal is to make complex shopping decisions simple for consumers,” Decide.com CEO Mike Fridgen told VentureBeat via email. “When shopping with Decide, consumers see the highest rated products applied to millions of expert and user reviews and know when is the best time to buy based on price predictions derived from billions of historical price observations.”

Decide.com will use the funding to expand products its provides data for. The company’s focus has mostly been on technology and devices, but it will add products from “all e-commerce categories” in the next few weeks. It also plans to hire more engineers to bolster its team.

The new funding round was led by Vulcan Capital, with participation by current investors Maveron and Madrona Venture Group. Including the new cash, Decide.com has raised $17 million to date.

Decide.com also adds two new board members with the cash infusion: Dawn Lepore, formerly the CEO of Drugstore.com, and Vulcan Capital manager director Steve Hall.

“We believe Decide.com’s Big Data approach to monitoring and analyzing product price volatility is poised to disrupt the e-commerce market and deliver huge value to consumers,” Hall said in statement.

Businessman deciding photo via Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock