I had mentioned a couple of months ago that I had my head down into a new project. It's been an open secret that the project is Milo.com, an online local comparison shopping engine. We index the inventory of stores nationwide and show you real-time, what is available around you. From an engineering perspective it's a cool problem because there is a lot of data to store and manage, as well as a lot of integration work to deal with the particular temperament of various retailers' inventory systems. Of course if it were easy, someone would have done it already.From a business perspective, I like it a lot. The online comparison shopping world is very crowded, and we didn't want to be just another me-too AdWords arbitrage/affiliate marketing site. When I got into this business, I thought that online shopping was like the Stairway to Heaven of Internet business, but with the local inventory lookup, I think we really have distinguished ourselves from the others out there.
Today I'm happy to announce that we've closed a $4 million Series A investment round, led by True Ventures, with other investors such as Ron Conway, Aaron Patzer, and Jeff Clavier also participating. As a side note, I was really impressed by the True team, and am happy to be working with them. There were ups and downs to the Series A process, and I have to say that pitching the True partners was a definite up.
Oh, right. We also have a mascot. His name is Milo, of course. Here he is attacking me at my desk:
