CPA Shopping Search Jellyfish Closes $5 Million Round

Madison, Wisconsin shopping search engine Jellyfish.com just announced the end of a $5 million round of funding from Kegonsa Capital Partners and Clyde Street Investments. It’s been a busy week of funding announcements for 2.0 style sites. Jellyfish searches for products across more than 1000 thousand stores that provide Cost-Per-Action compensation to Jellyfish for each purchase. Jellyfish then returns “at least half” of that compensation to users. Thus search results display the base price for any given store selling an item, the CPA return percentage and thus the ultimate price for buyers. Jellyfish calls it a Value Per Action (VPA) model.

Kegonsa Capital Partners and the company’s founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire provided initial seed funding for the company earlier this year. There is no shortage of comparison shopping sites around the web, but very few of them are this interesting. Sharing affiliate revenue is nothing new (see our coverage of Kulist and FatWallet, for example) but doing it with class and getting funding is impressive.

If the site gains substantial adoption, the company hopes it can drive base prices down and commissions up. Vivek Puri’s excellent blog StartupSquad had a good explanation of the service and reported that the round was about to close two weeks ago. See also our comparative review of shopping review sites Retrievo, ViewScore and Wize.