GoChime, a recent grad of the TechStars Seattle incubation program, has raised $630,000 in financing from angel investors Geoff Entress, Matt Shobe, Dave Carlson, Walter Winshall, Rob Martin, Kendall Kunz and Jason Seats.
As a result of the financing, BigDoor CEO Keith Smith (also an investor) has joined the board. GoChime is an online marketplace that matches individuals with brands, delivering relevant offers to people based on needs they’ve expressed on social media channels.
“We start by extracting an expression of need — i.e ‘I need to buy LSAT materials’ — from the social stream, then we match it with a relevant offer in our database,”explains co-founder Austin Evarts. “We display each match in a dashboard for our crowdsourced human network, the Chimers, to start making helpful recommendations.”
Evarts tells GeekWire that they’ve seen click-through-rates of 25 percent, with conversion rates that are 40 times better than traditional online advertising.
“Conversations are increasingly public across social media, meaning that expressions of need about specific products and services are also now public,” he said. “We believe that commerce in general is moving into our social streams and we intend establish GoChime as a leader through this major market transition.”
