As its Consumer Launch Approaches, More Than 1,000 Brands Partner with Startup Created by ex-Yahoo! Executives to Drive Personalized Deal-Discovery for Consumers and a More Effective Channel for Marketers in the Deal Economy
BELLEVUE, Wash.– ChoozOn, the world’s first personalized service for deal discovery and social shopping for deals, announced today the closing of a $3.2 million Series A round of funding from leading US and international angel investors. Leading this round of investment and joining ChoozOn Corporation’s Board of Directors are Michael Orsak of Worldview Technology Partners and James Brown of AVG Ventures. Founded by former Yahoo! executives and led by a team of digital marketing experts, ChoozOn will use the resources to ramp up the development of its innovative service, which allows consumers to create customized “personal deal networks”™ comprising their favorite stores, brands, product categories, loyalty programs, deal clubs, daily deal services, and shopping pals. The company also revealed that, in the three months since ChoozOn’s founding was announced, over 1,000 leading brands have signed on to be “chozen” by consumers for inclusion in their personal deal networks.
“ChoozOn is bringing to life the right idea at the right time with a team that has a proven record in delivering value to their customers.”
“What sets ChoozOn apart is our focus on helping consumers to make sense of the bewildering deals marketplace. ChoozOn is a highly personalized deal-discovery service that matches consumers to the most relevant offers while improving the value exchange between consumers and the brands they love,” said Nick Weir, CEO and co-founder of ChoozOn. “Brands have embraced our model and early investors have seized the opportunity to advance one of the most innovative deal services today.”
The investment will allow ChoozOn to accelerate the development of the consumer service, which launches later this quarter. Built on a platform that combines sophisticated deal-matching algorithms with the intelligence and social networking of deal-savvy shoppers, ChoozOn enables consumers to sift easily through the thousands of deals and loyalty program offers they receive or qualify for through their various card memberships. In addition, they will be able to connect with favorite brands, share detailed shopping preferences with those brands, and receive personalized offers matched to their interests. Choozers (ChoozOn members) collaborate in the excitement, fun and rewards of deal discovery with other shopping pals by starting or joining deal clubs, and by posting relevant offers and personal wish lists to their social networks.
“I am excited to be investing in a great management team that understands data, scaling, and marketing the way Nick Weir, former Yahoo! Vice President of Data Strategy, Usama Fayyad, former Chief Data Officer and EVP at Yahoo!, and Hunter Madsen, former marketing executive at J. Walter Thompson, Wired and Yahoo! do,” said Michael Orsak. “ChoozOn is bringing to life the right idea at the right time with a team that has a proven record in delivering value to their customers.”
In a recent national consumer survey, conducted for ChoozOn by Research Now*, more than four out of five American adults said it was too hard to sift through the growing number of deals and discounts in market and would welcome a personal service to filter and serve up the most relevant ones. Respondents also expressed willingness to let their favorite brands know and target their shopping preferences in return for receiving more relevant offers. Unlike other deal services, ChoozOn helps retailers and brands build customer loyalty by establishing a direct, two-way relationship with the ChoozOn members who have “chozen” to add them to their personal deal networks.
About ChoozOn
ChoozOn enables its members to create the world’s first personal deal networks, designed exclusively for the discovery and sharing of relevant deals and connecting with favorite brands. With this platform, ChoozOn creates new business opportunities for advertisers and rewarding experiences for consumers. Much as Facebook helps people manage their social network, and LinkedIn helps them get more from their professional network, ChoozOn helps people get the most from their consumer network.
The company is founded by leading digital marketing and data experts Nick Weir, Usama Fayyad, and Hunter Madsen, whose vision and innovation has helped shape the strategy of many organizations, including Yahoo!, Audience Science (formerly digiMine), Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, NASA, Wired, and J. Walter Thompson. For more information, visit www.choozon.com and follow us on Twitter.
[*Source: “Web Deals & Discounts Study,” Research Now, April 2011]
Source: Business Wire / PDF