Recent press releases
Recent press reviews
Recent press releases
[2008-01-16] Criteo secures €7 million Series B funding led by Index Ventures
- Real-time personalised recommendations maximising eCommerce and Advertising returns -
London and Paris 16th January 2008 – Criteo (www.criteo.com), which provides real-time, personalised recommendations to millions of users of eCommerce websites and advertising platforms, has secured €7 million of Series B funding led by Index Ventures. The round also includes historical investors AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners, bringing the total financing of the company to €10 million. This new funding will allow Criteo, a company founded two years ago and already successful in France, to expand into key markets, including the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. Aelios Finance served as financial advisor to Criteo.
Index Ventures partner Dom Vidal said: “Criteo’s advanced technology enables the broadest range of e-tailers, advertisers and publishers the opportunity to drastically expand their customer base and increase their consumption. Criteo’s strong team and technology and their desire to address an untapped global market made this an attractive investment proposition for Index.”
Real-time personalised recommendations based on a user’s past browsing behaviour are becoming recognised as the most effective way to help customers navigate enormous online catalogues. In addition to increasing both the value of and number of items in a customer’s shopping basket, this delivers to eCommerce websites the benefits of the much-lauded ‘long tail’ of niche, rare and hard-to-find products and services. Criteo’s technology is also used by affiliation and advertising platforms to optimise click-thru and transformation rates. The service is delivered on software as a service model based on plug-and-play web widgets.
The past year has shown a dramatic increase of Criteo technology adoption with 4000 websites installing its widgets, daily generating more than 15 million personalised recommendations to 50 million unique users.
“Online consumers are overwhelmed by irrelevant commercial propositions. They need to be guided to the right products and services suited to their particular needs and tastes,” said Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO and founder of Criteo. “Effective filtering is central to maximising the return from each and every customer. Past and real-time browsing behaviour is by far the best proxy for future browsing, clicks and purchases. Criteo’s algorithm – based on analyzing millions of statistical events – delivers the best accuracy in recommending products and content to users. This new round of funding from Index Ventures will allow us to launch into a number of important European markets, starting with the UK.”
About Criteo
Criteo is the worldwide expert in real-time personalized recommendation solutions and the only one to deliver a cost-effective and scalable turnkey solution to e-tailers, affiliation and advertising platforms, allowing them to realize the long-promised sales benefits of the long tail. Criteo’s solution is a new generation of collaborative technology that helps clients optimize their search and allows users interconnect with their “twins” – other users with similar affinities – thus helping people with the same interests rapidly find relevant and compelling information, products or services. A private, venture-backed company, Criteo was founded in 2005 and headquartered in Paris, France, with an office in San Francisco. For more information visit www.criteo.com
About Index Ventures
Index Ventures is a leading European venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The firm has offices in Geneva, London and Jersey and focuses its investment activity primarily on Europe and Israel. Investments include Skype (the pioneering communications company acquired by eBay); MySQL (the world’s most popular open source database) and Last.fm (the world’s largest social music platform, recently acquired by CBS). For more information, please visit www.indexventures.com.
About AGF Private Equity
AGF Private Equity is a leading management company specialized in Private Equity offering a customized exposure to the asset class. With €2 billion under management, AGF Private Equity acts both as a seasoned manager of European funds of funds and as one of the most active French investors in European technology venture capital. Investments include Meetic, Viadeo and Dailymotion. For more information, please visit www.agfpe.com
About Elaia Partners
Elaia Partners is an independent venture capital firm focused on software-based technology. It has over € 50M under direct management and by delegation. The company works closely with the companies in its portfolio at all stages of development. Investments include Ornis, Calendra, Seanodes and Total Immersion. For more information, please visit www.elaia.com.
[2007-11-09] Effiliation & Criteo partner to allow affiliate marketers to provide targeted advertising
Paris – A worldwide first, Criteo, the specialist in real-time personalised recommendations on the Internet, and Effiliation, one of the first affiliate marketing agencies in France announce a technical partnership which brings personalised advertising, based on behavioural targeting, to affiliate marketers and advertisers.
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his efforts. The promotion of the products can take the form of advertising banners, pop-ups or links. Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. According to one report, total sales generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone.*
Until now, advertising campaigns on affiliate networks have provided the same advertisement to all internet users visiting the affiliate site. This limits the products the advertiser is able to show and does not enable the ad to be customised in any way. Effiliation has integrated Criteo’s recommendation technology onto its affiliate platform. This technology provides Internet users, visiting an affiliate site in the Effiliation network, with customised advertisements based on their prior browsing behaviour. This is a more effective way of promoting an advertiser’s products and leads to increased click through
rates.
Criteo’s recommendation technology is making behaviourally-targeted advertising a reality. By implementing Criteo’s technology, Effiliation will optimise the performance of affiliate marketing campaigns; advertisers will increase incremental sales and will be better able to leverage the long tail; and affiliates will be able to offer their visitors better targeted and therefore more effective advertisements.
« This agreement and implementation illustrates the broad use of Criteo’s recommendation solutions. Criteo’s technology is being used by eCommerce sites, portals, affiliate marketers, advertisers and bloggers, » explains Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO of Criteo.
« We are pleased to have partnered with Criteo as the benefits its technology brings to our network are realised at every level. Internet users will now have access to customised and targeted information which will help them considerably in their purchasing decisions, affiliates will be able to increase the profitability of their ad space through increased click throughs, and advertisers will optimise their affiliation campaigns and increase their profitability,” adds Christophe Bosquet, Associate Director at Effiliation.
* « Affiliate Marketing Networks Buyers Guide”, October 2006, eConsultancy
About Criteo
Criteo is the worldwide expert in real-time personalised recommendation solutions and the only one to deliver a cost-effective and scalable turnkey solution to e-tailers, content portals and community sites, allowing them to realise the long-promised sales benefits of the long tail. Criteo’s solution is a new generation of collaborative technology that helps clients optimise their search and allows users interconnect with their “twins” – other users with similar affinities – thus helping people with the same interests rapidly find relevant and compelling information, products or services.
A private, venture-backed company, Criteo was founded in 2005 and headquartered in Paris, France, with an office in San Francisco.
For more information visit www.criteo.com
About Effiliation
Effiliation is an affiliation network specialised in the implementation and management of affiliation programmes. Specialised in performance marketing, Effiliation puts advertisers and affiliates together in a win-win situation. Effiliation’s mission is to build and implement affiliate strategies with a team of 20 highly motivated individuals, 45 000 websites and webmasters, high-level technology, a powerful affiliate network and a creative studio experiences in affiliation techniques.
www.effiliation.com
Press Contacts: Criteo
Ballou PR
Nadia Boussouar
Tel : +33 (0)1 42 22 96 88
e-mail: nadia@balloupr.com
Press Contacts : Effiliation
Céline ROUHEN
+33 (0)1 72 36 61 52
celine@effiliation.com
Recent press reviews
Personalized Recommandations Provider Criteo Gets $10.3 Million (16/01/2008 - Mark Hefflinger)
Paris - Criteo, a provider of personalize purchasing recommendations for online shoppers, has raised $10.3 million in its second round of venture capital financing, led by Index Ventures.
Return backers AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners also participated in the round, which Criteo will use to expand into new markets, including the U.K., Germany, Italy and Spain.
Founded in 2005, Paris-based Criteo delivers real-time personalized recommendations to online shoppers, based on a user’s past browsing behavior.
The company’s widgets have been installed on some 4,000 websites, are generate more than 15 million personalized recommendations for 50 million unique users each day.
Recommandations Engine Criteo Funded To Launch In UK And Elsewhere (16/01/2008 - Robert Andrews)
Paris-based consumer recommendations provider Criteo has got a 7 million euro (£5.25 million) second round of funding to roll out in to the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. The service can capture customer preferences through inviting product ratings and by analysing historical web browsing behaviour. It can then serve up product recommendations based either on what similar people have purchased or on what might be related to previously viewed pages. The idea is, this service is then offered as white-label to ecommerce operators, but it could be used for video sites, too.
It’s only what Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) has been doing for years, but Criteo says some 4,000 websites installed its new blog widgets last year, generating over 15 million daily product recommendations to over 50 million users. This round is led by Index Ventures and includes existing backers AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners, from whom Criteo got three million euros (£2.25 million) in seed funds. Britain is first on the list of target territories for the global expansion.
Criteo Raises $10 Million From Index Ventures (16/01/2008 - Erick Schonfeld)
French startup Criteo just raised $10.4 million (7 million Euros) in a B round from Index Ventures, reports TechCrunch France. This is on top of a 3-million-Euro round in April 2006 led by AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners.
Criteo sells recommendation-engine software to e-commerce and content sites. Competitors include Aggregate Knowledge, CleverSet, and ChoiceStream. Discovery is hot right now. For instance, Kleiner-backed Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million. It is good to see some competition stirring across from across the pond.
Incidentally, Criteo is probably best known among bloggers in the U.S for its AutoRoll widget that generates a linkroll based on the reading habits of a blog’s readers. Any blog that has the AutoRoll widget on it will show the other top AutoRoll blogs that its readers have also visited. There are 12,000 blogs with the AutoRoll widget (I used to have one on my old blog, the Next Net). It is an interesting idea, but hasn’t quite reached critical mass yet. Good thing the AutoRoll is not Criteo’s main business driver.