Disrupt Finalist Boomerang Commerce Raises $8.5M Series A Round For Its Price Optimization Service

Boomerang Commerce, one of our six finalists at the latest Disrupt in New York, today announced that it has raised an $8.5 million Series A round. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group and Trinity Ventures. Both investors will also take seats on the company’s board.

The company helps large e-commerce retailers set their prices based on comparing their prices with competitors and helping them optimize their prices based on different criteria (revenue, profit and sales volume, for example). Boomerang never took any seed money, so this Series A round actually marks the first time it has taken outside funding.

As Boomerang’s CEO Guru Hariharan tells me, the company expects to use this new financing to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, as well as to build additional retail applications on top of its platform. Right now, Hariharan is doing most of the sales himself, and the company is getting quite a bit of traction through word-of-mouth from existing customers, which now include the likes of Staples in the U.S. and Canada and Sears, which is working on a pilot project with the company.

When the company presented at Disrupt earlier this year, it had 16 engineers; that number is already up to around 25 today. Now, Boomerang is looking to at least triple its engineering force, which is mostly based in Bangalore, over the next few months and to hire a number of executives to help it manage its quickly growing workforce.

Hariharan tells me that the team went out to talk to VCs right after Disrupt earlier this year. He was specifically looking for companies that had experience and extensive networks in the e-commerce space and Seattle-based Madrona fit that bill nicely. Hariharan was also looking for experience in SaaS-based businesses that sell to enterprises, however, and Madrona actually introduced him to Trinity, which quickly offered the company a term sheet.

As for the product itself, Hariharan wasn’t ready to give us any updates on future plans yet, but he noted that the team had started to incorporate a game theory approach to pricing into its engine lately, and that it is now giving users more flexibility in what to optimize their prices for.

You can find out more about Boomerang and its service from our previous coverage here.