Briefs

By Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, 04/09/2008

Richrelevance: The San Francisco company, which offers personalized recommendations for online shopping businesses, has raised $4.2 million in a second round of financing.

The company joins a host of other companies - including Amazon, Aggregate Knowledge and Wunderloop - that track what decisions you make while shopping online. Like these other companies, it then peers into its archives to find other users who have made decisions similar to yours so it can recommend things that people with similar tastes have also bought.

Richrelevance has been secretive, raising a single round of financing last year from venture firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and angel investors.

The latest financing comes from Greylock Partners and Tugboat Ventures.

The company plans to make more of a public splash in June. Notably, the company's chief executive, David Selinger, previously managed Amazon's data mining and personalization R&D team, including its personalization engine. Amazon was a path breaker in the personal recommendation area. Also, his most recent post was at Overstock.com, where he led data mining. Overstock was an early customer of Aggregate Knowledge. So Selinger knows his competitors - Amazon and Aggregate Knowledge - well.

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