ATG Buys CleverSet For $10 Million

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

cleverset-logo.pngLast October, at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad, the startup voted “Most Likely to Exit First” was CleverSet. Now three months later, CleverSet has sold itself to e-commerce software company Art Technology Group (ATG) for $10 million. It turns out to be a nice exit for CEO Todd Humphrey and founder Bruce D’Ambrosio, who built the company with about $3 million in capital and a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

But it doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the hype surrounding “discovery” right now. CleverSet offers discovery and recommendation engines to e-commerce sites, using a statistical approach to making product matches. The Seattle-based startup competes with the likes of Aggregate Knowledge, Criteo, MyStrands, and ChoiceStream. The investors in those companies are expecting much larger exits. Criteo just raised $10 million in a venture round. And Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million.

By those measures, $10 million is either a steal, or discovery just isn’t the next search.

Sponsored Ads

blog comments powered by Disqus

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads