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April 20, 2006
VCs Back Criteo's New Way To Recommend Films
Criteo, a French startup wants to make sure that users of its online video recommendation service never again pay to see a movie they won't like, or buy a DVD that's a dud. It announced today that it raised €3M in seed capital from Paris-based investors, AGF Private Equity and ELAIA.
Criteo was founded in 2005 and has been on our radar for a few months now. What made us look twice when we first heard about Criteo was its founding team.
Co-founder and CEO, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle (pictured right), had a career at Lucent and Philips before he started up a ringtone provider called K-Mobile, which he then sold to AG Interactive in 2004 for an undisclosed amount. (AG Interactive is a subsidiary of American Greetings).
Shortly afterwards, he founded Criteo, along with two former Microsoft R&D execs that returned to France after working in Redmond, namely Franck Le Ouay, who was an R&D exec at Microsoft and has patents in gaming rendering technologies, and Romain Niccoli, who led software engineering teams at the software giant
Criteo is being sold as a white label service to large portals and websites that want to improve merchandizing of their product categories, for instance films.
The idea being that they will buy DVDs and videos with more confidence, and maybe more frequently, if the recommendations are precise enough.
It will not be offering services under its own brand. Although, the founders set up criteo.com, a consumer oriented website, the site is only meant to demo the product, according to Rudelle. It launched in Beta late last year and has signed up about 180,000 users.
The firm has developed predictive algorithms and combines them with user generated profiles, to make film recommendations. It is an improvement on the recommendation engine that is built into Amazon, we believe, because it is based on what a user likes, rather than what they bought.
Another difference is that it gives weight to negative choices. Users select movies they dont like, which will then influence the film recommendations.
The founders say the technology can be applied to other types of media. They picked films as the first category.
Posted on April 20, 2006 11:43 AM | Posted to Web 2.0 | Permalink
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» Criteo raises 3m€ series A round from Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz
Criteo is a white-label recommendation engine: a bit what Amazon does when they recommend to you a book that someone else read and that you might like, but they apply it to anything. It was started last year by [Read More]
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» Criteo lève 3 Millions d'euros. from Jacques FROISSANT Altaïde
Criteo, start up française, vient de lever 3 millions d’euros auprès d’AGF Private Equity et de Elaia Partners. Criteo est un moteur prédictif temps réel qui permet, en se basant sur les comportements passés des utilisateurs et sur leurs éval... [Read More]
Tracked on April 22, 2006 10:24 PM
