The $15M round was led by Bain Capital with previous investors, Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures, participating.
Co-founder & CEO, Siva Kumar told me that TheFind will use the money to continue development of its search engine, build traffic through partnerships (this funding gives the company a bit more credibility amongst the second tier engines), and develop/ramp up an ad sales team.
TheFind makes money through sponsored search listings (syndicated from Shopping.com) and graphical ads (sold by partner, Glam.com).
According to Siva, the $15m is more than enough to fund operations to cash flow positive, which is expected within 12 months.
Current traffic on the site is about 2m unique users and growing about 30% a month, which means TheFind expects 4-5m unique users this holiday season. Page views currently stand at about 10m/month.
If TheFind sold through it’s inventory right now (made up of banners, leaderboards, sky scrapers, etc.), the company could generate aprx. $100,000/month (10,000,000 page views @ $10/1000 impressions). Assuming TheFind reaches 4m uniques this holiday season and maintains about 5 page views per unique, the company could generate aprx. $200,000/month (20,000,000 page views @ $10/1000 impressions). These number do not include revenue from Shopping.com’s syndicated listings.
TheFind won’t come near these numbers because it can’t ramp up a sales force to sell through its inventory. However, it will continue to make some dough through its Shopping.com deal, Glam partnership and other similar ad network deals.
TheFind raised $7m in its first round and $4.5m in its second round. With the $15m from this round, TheFind has now raised more than $26m.
2m unique users a month and growing? I am hardly one to believe Alexa / Compete / Quantcast rankings and data, but they seem to show TheFind around 300k per month in uniques and not growing. Am I missing something or is this data quoted above from TheFind’s internal tracking?
This should not detract from their obvious success in raising capital however.
I still think the jury is out on this model for success (opposed to the more “traditional” model of CPC). Time as always will tell.
Congrats to Dave and all the folks at The Find
They’ve built an awesome engine that successfully blends the visual expectations of a shopper with quality, relevant results.