DISTRIBUTED CONSUMER RATING COMPANY RATEITALL SECURES FUNDING
San Francisco, CA, June 18, 2008 - RateItAll, a distributed consumer rating web application that allows users to find, share and solicit opinions on any topic, has announced that it has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from a number of top Silicon Valley angel investors and seed funds. Investors include Accelerator Ventures, JAIC America, Pacific I&T Ventures, and Eric Di Benedetto. The primary use of funds will be to improve the site’s UI and to continue to execute its distributed rating model, leveraging widgets, applications, and APIs.
“The consumer rating landscape is hopelessly fragmented,” says RateItAll CEO and co-founder Lawrence Coburn. “Consumers shouldn’t have to visit multiple sites with multiple logins to find and share opinions on the things that they are passionate about.”
By making its service available anywhere via applications on popular social networks, embeddable read / write widgets, and its APIs, RateItAll plans to free up its consumer review content and functionality so that it can easily be added to any website.
“Working with minimal resources, RateItAll has already achieved significant traction both in terms of destination site traffic and ratings engagement,” says Eric Di Benedetto. “I look forward to seeing what they can do with some funding.”
In addition to being able to rate and review virtually anything, visitors to RateItAll.com may also create and manage their own ratings channels (e.g. Best Tech Blog). Revenue is shared with content contributors via the Google AdSense API.
“I find the economics behind RateItAll’s distinctive brand of user generated content very compelling,” says Accelerator Ventures’ Managing Director Alexander Lloyd. “Not only are users posting monetizable reviews, they are also creating the ratings categories themselves.”
There were approximately 1M visits to RateItAll.com in May, and the number of ratings posted per month has grown by approximately 1000% since February.
About RateItAll
Based in San Francisco, RateItAll is a distributed consumer rating community where visitors can find and share opinions on virtually any topic. All of the site's content is available for syndication via widgets, and RateItAll members share in the advertising revenue associated with their reviews. RateItAll's mission is to power the distributed exchange of the world's opinions.
About Accelerator Ventures
Accelerator Ventures (AV) is a San Francisco-based Venture Capital fund that invests in early stage technology companies. Founded by Alexander Lloyd, AV brings to entrepreneurs its strong understanding of technology, capital, and venture market intelligence. AV actively helps with financing strategy, finding partnerships, customer introductions and management team development. AV invests at the earliest stage of capital raising and seeks to leverage its domain expertise to take its portfolio companies up along the path toward liquidity. AV leverages its network of angel investors, early stage funds and venture capital firms in order to meet the funding needs of early stage startups. AV invests in world-class ideas and helps make them into reality.
About JAIC America
JAIC America is a fully owned subsidiary of Tokyo-based Japan Asia Investment Co., Ltd. Since its establishment in 1999, JAIC America has invested in Information Technology and Life Science start-ups including GCT Semiconductor, Mediaplex, ScanR, Micrus, and Avantis Medical Device.
About Eric Di Benedetto
Eric Di Benedetto has been a professional investor in software start-ups for the last two decades. The aggregate market capitalization of companies Eric sponsored has reached several billion dollars. After a successful career as a venture capitalist, Eric established ActiveStarts as an angel investment firm focused on the coaching and financing needs of emerging software entrepreneurs. Eric’s portfolio companies include Chegg, ClairMail, LendingClub, RapLeaf, RealTravel and Plastyc.
