Deal Radar 2008: TheFind

We profiled Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind.com, a discovery shopping search engine last year. This is yet another vertical search engine optimized for visual merchandising oriented lifestyle products.

In July 2007, TheFind raised $15 million in a third round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Ignition, Lightspeed and Redpoint. It had previously raised $11 million in two rounds ($7 million in Series A & $4.5 million in Series B) from Cambrian Ventures, Lightspeed and Redpoint.

TheFind is expected to hit profitability in early 2008. The company partners with women’s vertical network Glam Media to deliver both advertising and content. The site commands CPMs of $5-$10.

TheFind, in partnership with PayPal, has also launched a new shopping search engine built specifically to enable consumers to browse products exclusively from merchants who accept PayPal payments.

Post the holidays, TheFind now has a little over 50k unique visitors per day. Its patent pending “Product Ranking Engine” crawls over 500,000 stores to find over 170 million products. The site attracts largely women shoppers (70%) typically between ages 25 to 45. Average sessions last 6.5 to 7 minutes and involves 3-4 searches and 5+ page views.

TheFind acquired women’s fashion shopping site Glimpse.com in August 2007. The acquisition will provide TheFind.com with a larger female audience and more high-fashion products. However, TheFind itself is an acquisition target for eBay or Amazon. By acquiring TheFind, eBay, especially, can cut down on both its customer acquisition cost and dependency on Google, and offer a nice shopping experience instead of the current sloppy one.

My favorite element of TheFind’s user experience is the ability to “find other products like this” based on rather sophisticated image search and matching technology. In other words, you can scout for more products like that navy blue Giorgio Armani jacket you liked … really cool!

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008