OpenCandy Announces $3.5 Million Series A Financing

OpenCandy Inc demonstrates that startups with proven ideas - particularly in the area of monetization - may very well weather the current financial crisis.  They announced a few days ago a Series A financing round in the order of $3.5 million.

OpenCandy’s distribution engine technology is targeted particularly to application developers who don’t have huge marketing resources or distribution networks to grow their installed base.

Originally developed to bundle software installs for DivX, OpenCandy’s technology opens up an association based recommendation network into your application’s installation routine.  When a user installs your application, they will receive suggestions to install other associated applications.  As the host application you can not only decide to hand-pick apps that you like and want to support, but also allow the distribution engine to associate apps for you (which will be a paid recommendation).  To maximize user acceptance, the additional recommendations will always be purely opt-in.  The company claims to have some intelligent evaluation routines which will determine relevant recommendations based on the software which is already installed on the user’s computer.

My take on this: the capability to mix-and-match altruistic genuine recommendations with a royalty based system gives this technology a "please everybody" characteristic that should help it gain widespread acceptance.

Financing was supplied by Bessemer Venture Partners, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and a group of angel investors which include Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, Mozilla), and Jordan Greenhall (Former CEO and Co-Founder of DivX).

(via TheDownloadBlog)