Former Googlers Launch TellApart, Raise $4.75 Million From Greylock

Silicon Valley based TellApart, founded by ex Googlers Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat, unveiled its service today. They also are announcing a $4.75 million first round of financing in a round led by Greylock Partners, and Greylock partner James Slavet has joined the board of directors. The service helps ecommerce companies increase revenue by analyzing and targeting buyer behavior.

Here’s how it works – ecommerce services share deep user data with TellApart, which then targets those consumers with advertising and other mechanism to get them to return to the site and buy more stuff. This includes targeting ads at those buyers when they are out surfing the web, identifying them via the cookie from the original ecommerce site.

The company has been in trials with at least three ecommerce sites – Hay Needle, Ebags, Diapers.com – since late last year. They charge the sites only for a percentage of increased sales (basically an affiliate fee), and they say that the value a user brings to an ecommerce site through them is roughly 2x the original value of the customer. Revenue run rate is “in the seven figures” already, Greylock tells us.

I sat down with the founders and Slavet earlier today to talk about the service and the funding. The video is below.