Slice, the technology start-up whose goal is to organize all commerce data by using the details buried in your inbox, has actually closed on $23 million in Series B financing led by e-commerce giant Rakuten, often described as the Amazon of Japan. Also taking part in the round were Siguler Guff’s Russia Partners and NPD Group, as well as previous investors, DCM, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Lightspeed Endeavor Partners.
With the new investment, explains Piece CEO Scott Brady, the goal was to generate different point of views outside Silicon Valley. ‘We’ve actually got an extremely significant Oriental company, and we’ve actually got an extremely significant European presence now. The objective was … to broaden our thinking. However our core goal has not changed. We are still concentrated on arranging all the commerce individuals have,’ he states.
Founded in 2010, Piece debuted its first item, ‘All My Purchases’ in May 2011 as an add-on for Yahoo Mail, permitting users to discover all their order confirmations and receipts in one spot. The company’s technology has become a lot more advanced in the years considering that. The mobile variation of Piece, which launched in late 2011, now offers a similar way to track your e-receipts, however likewise tracks bundles, keeps an eye on your online spending, and watches for cost drops so you can request a discount, among other things. To this day, the app has tracked over 90 million products for a complete purchase value of almost $3 billion.
This summertime, the business expanded into another vertical with the launching of Goodreads competitor Slice Bookshelf, a social service for readers that goes into both your inbox and Facebook profile data to uncover the books you’ve actually acquired and delighted in, the latter based on Facebook Likes.
Brady sees Piece as something that plays in the very same basic space as Google Now, a product that digs into information from Google’s own set of services like Gmail, Calendar, Maps and search history to proactively alert users about details simply when they need it. With Piece, however, the business has a narrower focus – commerce – however a possibly broader footprint as it can work cross-platform and cross-‘inbox.’
In addition to constructing its own products in-house, a huge part of Slice’s company visits accrediting its information through an API. The business today is dealing with numerous large business in numerous stages of testing and integrations, but is announcing that shopping discovery service TheFind is the very first to openly disclose its collaboration with Piece. The shopping service has integrated Piece into its iPad app as well as on the internet, allowing users to link their inboxes to track their purchases and aid power product suggestions.
Though Slice to date has focused on e-commerce, Brady states that the innovation has possible in offline commerce, plus payments, travel, finance, and more. For instance, he visualizes new services like a social app developed around travel, where Slice could take every place you have been and plot it on a map immediately, or a financial app of some kind where people can much better understand where, exactly how and on exactly what they invested their money. (You can see hints of this in today’s Piece app, but the company can opt to break that off into a standalone service the future.)
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In terms of the Rakuten financial investment, nevertheless, there’s an evident capacity in helping power online recommendations in the business’s own item suite, including its e-commerce site, but possibly other items also – like its Netflix rival Wuaki, as an example. But Brady states Rakuten isn’t an API partner today.
Up Next: A New Slice App Before The Holidays
More instantly, Piece’s focus is on product development, with strategies to ship a more interactive variation of its flagship app by the holidays with features consumers have actually been demanding. Brady will not reveal exactly what these may be, but an iPad-optimized version is an obvious next step.
The company will likewise continue hiring, especially on the item and information side of the business. Today, the Palo Alto-based startup has 50 full-time employees, primarily engineers, and a number of information scientists.
Ultimately, Brady believes that if Piece’s innovation reaches the point where it’s checking out individuals’s e-mail inboxes around the globe, the business can produce a replica of the point-of-sale systems from every major merchant worldwide. ‘Whoever can aggregate this info at scale is producing exactly what I believe is among the most useful info sets in the world,’ says Brady. ‘I assume it’s going to drive customization, it’s going to drive marketing, and offer generation.’
To make all this work, naturally, Slice will need to bewaren’t to sneak out consumers, who’ve actually grown more conscious – and cautious of – being tracked. To make certain it does not cross any lines, Brady states that everything Piece provides is opt-in, and beneficial to consumers. ‘All this data visits the cloud currently – our difficulty is creating terrific experiences for the info you currently have.’