
ChoozOn (d.b.a. Blue Kangaroo)
Blue Kangaroo is a personalized search engine that allows users to find offers, deals and discount coupons..
Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
---|---|---|---|
investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
N/A | $1.3m | Series A | |
Total Funding | 000k |
USD | 2019 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Revenues | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 |
% growth | - | - | - | (41 %) |
EBITDA | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 |
Profit | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 |
EV | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 |
EV / revenue | 00.0x | 00.0x | 00.0x | 00.0x |
EV / EBITDA | 00.0x | 00.0x | 00.0x | 00.0x |
R&D budget | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 | 0000 |
Source: Dealroom estimates
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ChoozOn Corporation, which operated under the brand name Blue Kangaroo, was established in 2010 as a venture that pivoted from a deal aggregator to an AI-powered personal shopper platform for retail brands. The company was founded by a trio of former Yahoo! executives: Nick Weir, who served as CEO, along with Usama Fayyad and Hunter Madsen. Their collective background in online marketing, data mining, and search technology at Yahoo! inspired the creation of a new network built specifically for shopping, aiming to benefit both consumers and brands. Initially, ChoozOn functioned as a deal aggregation service where users could specify brand preferences to receive tailored promotions.
The business evolved to offer a more sophisticated B2B solution named BlueRoo, a conversational AI platform positioned as a 'Virtual Sales Associate'. This platform was designed to integrate across a retailer’s entire digital presence, including their website, app, social media, and even in-store touchpoints. Its core function was to engage customers in personalized conversations to understand their needs and preferences, thereby creating deep social and conversational shopping profiles. By leveraging natural language processing and a recommendation engine trained on billions of shopping events, BlueRoo provided personalized product suggestions and loyalty offers. The platform aimed to solve key retail challenges by unifying new data with existing CRM systems for enhanced personalization and enabling granular ad retargeting.
The company’s business model focused on driving revenue growth for its retail clients through several mechanisms: opening new sales channels, improving conversion rates, and increasing average order value via data-driven upselling and cross-selling. It also offered cost savings by automating customer engagement, potentially reducing the need for human customer service agents and minimizing development and maintenance investments for retailers. Revenue for the earlier deal aggregator model was generated through commissions from product sales via affiliate marketing and by selling aggregated, anonymous user data. Although the company secured angel and venture funding, ChoozOn, also known as Blue Kangaroo, ceased operations in 2020. Keywords: ChoozOn, Blue Kangaroo, BlueRoo, Usama Fayyad, Nick Weir, Hunter Madsen, conversational AI, personal shopper platform, virtual sales associate, retail technology, product recommendations, customer engagement, personalization engine, e-commerce AI, deal aggregator, ad retargeting, omni-channel retail, CRM data, chatbot, NLP for retail, ceased operations, former Yahoo executives