Deutsche Telekom spin-out Yoochoose raises seed capital

Funding

Yoochoose GmbH of Cologne, Germany, a spin-out from Deutsche Telekom’s laboratories, has raised seed-finance from High-Tech Gründerfonds and the Connected Life and Work Fund, which is managed by T-Venture.

The company has developed a high performance ‘recommender’ that enables customers to significantly increase their revenues from personal recommendations. In contrast to existing systems for tapping into the selling power of personal recommendations, Yoochoose recommendations can be content-overarching, for example, videos, music, software, and games, and independent from existing shop, data mining or content management systems that have already been implemented.

The Yoochoose recommender system comes from research project between Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin and researchers in Israel. “It is increasingly becoming a critical success factor for eCommerce companies to offer to customers the right value at the right time. With a Recommender System as advanced as the Yoochoose engine you know your customer and create a unique selling point,” said Oliver Fietz, Fund Manager at T-Venture.

Yoochoose was founded in February 2009 and has since attracted its first pilot customers. The seed financing by High-Tech Gründerfonds and T-Venture will allow the company to market the recommendation system to a broad spectrum e-commerce, media and publishing companies.