Commerce Sciences, an Israeli eCommerce startup currently shrouded in the infamous “stealth mode,” wants to help personalize your online shopping experience.
To do so, the Palo Alto and Israeli-based company is announcing today that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from a number of familiar names. The investors include Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, veteran Israeli VC firm Genesis Partners, T5 Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Backplane board chairman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
Founded in late 2011, Commerce Sciences is currently in private beta and the team isn’t saying much about the specifics of what they’re doing. But, what we do know, is that the eCommerce market is exploding both at home and abroad. Commerce Sciences Co-founder Aviv Revach tells us that, for eCommerce companies to be successful on the Web, it’s critical for them to be able to tailor the shopping experience to the individual, personalizing not only recommendations but the entire experience in such a way as to make it stickier, more streamlined, and more engaging.
Both Revach and co-founder Eyal Brosh said that they are focused on bringing together methodologies and technologies from the fields of behavioral economics, big data and predictive analytics to create what will eventually be an end-to-end personalization platform for eCommerce players.
Revach and Brosh bring significant experience in these spaces to bear on their new venture, as Revach is himself a serial entrepreneur (and co-founder of Mominis), while Brosh is an ex-VP of R&D and Application Development at Flash Networks. Both co-founders are also alumni of the Israeli intelligence corps.
The co-founders said that, like Palantir, they want to bring sophisticated, government-grade technology to online shopping. While they wouldn’t say when, the official beta launch of Commerce Sciences is coming soon and will include, for example, a platform agnostic plug-in which will enable online commerce companies to become “more intuitive and stand out from their competitors, while helping them to increase sales online.”
The end goal, Revach says, is not purely to focus on product results but to help retailers personalize the many aspects of the shopper’s experience, regardless of platform. That’s why the team has built its plug-in, he says, to seamlessly integrate with all the popular eCommerce platforms — Magento osCommerce, Zencart, Cirtuemart, Demandware, et al — to make this happen.
Commerce Sciences is hoping to emerge from stealth mode in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for more.