Retrevo’s Vipin Jain on Vertical Search (3)

SM: Who financed the company at the very beginning?
VJ: Ammar Hanafi @ Alloy Ventures seed funded in Feb 2006.

SM: Did you raise Angel money? How much? From whom?
VJ: Three founders bootstrapped the company with $150K cash.

SM: Did you raise Venture money? How much? From whom?
VJ: Total $3.9M venture money raised from Norwest Venture Partners and Alloy Ventures.

SM: What stage are you at now?VJ: Series B.

SM: What kind of traction do you have?
VJ: We have a few hundred thousand visitors a month. Traffic has been growing week over week and we are only scratching the surface right now.

SM: Is your team complete? Does it have depth?
VJ: We are always looking for good talent across biz dev, products mgmt and R&D. Send any referrals :-).

SM: What is the business model of your company? Ad Revenue only? Or are you also going to private label on behalf of other media / internet companies? What do you charge to do so?
VJ: Product, service and content referral. We don’t do private label but we do cobranded sites. Click-through referrals are monetized via a merchant network. CPC is in the 20c to $1 range, and it varies by network and by category. The top merchant networks that work with this business model are Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, etc. With big sites, like the AOL-Google deal, AOL gets to keep 90% of the revenues. Smaller players like us get to keep ~50%. [You can read some discussion on CPC vs. CPA here.]

SM: What is the revenue & profitability status of the company?
VJ: Just started monetizing. Our objective is to reach profitability next year. We need a couple of million unique visitors a month to get there.

SM: Are you looking to raise another round of funding? Timeframe?
VJ: It is reasonable to assume we will. This year we are focusing on building out the product completely and getting user traction. Giving our users a wholesome experience. Next year, we will determine if and when to raise money depending on our business conditions and market conditions.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Product Review]