Trapezo, developer of a web-based platform designed to fully manage the distribution of dynamic content, promotions, merchandise and related business rules between partners, today announced $12 million in funding led by SOFTBANK Venture Capital. Athena Technology Ventures also participated in this third-round financing.
Trapezo will use the funding for ongoing product development, infrastructure build-out, marketing and strategic initiatives. Heidi Roizen, managing director at SOFTBANK Venture Capital and Ryan McIntyre, a venture partner at SOFTBANK Venture Capital and co-founder of Excite, will join Trapezo’s board of directors.
Trapezo’s Partner Fusion Platform provides consumer websites, online business marketplaces and corporate extranets with a suite of solutions for aggregating and managing content, including contextually integrating and managing commerce, content and promotions.
Present systems were not intended to support real-time flow of content, products and business rules across the Internet. The challenge businesses’ face is that their content and product catalogs often are locked in proprietary databases and inflexible content management systems on the back-end, and the goods are displayed on partner sites in the form of static links or hard coded pages with little contextual integration or impressive visual appeal on the front-end.
Trapezo makes the convergence and syndication of commerce, content and business rules frictionless, helping companies leverage the reach, customer-base and other values that business partners offer. Because companies increasingly compete on the strength of their business alliances and partnerships, the need for such purpose-built tools to support fast, efficient partnering across the network is critical.
With Trapezo’s Partner Fusion Platform, web-based businesses can more easily and efficiently aggregate and manage content; ensure a consistent look, feel and placement of content on web pages, wireless devices or email channels; dynamically serve content, promotions or merchandise into contextually relevant pages; track, measure and report on site performance; and set specific business licensing terms with partners based on the frequency with which the content is accessed or other metrics.
Trapezo partners benefit from a standards-based, XML-driven technology platform designed from inception with integrated support for the entire process of managing distributed content, commerce and business rules with partners across the Internet. Customers include ZDNet, MyFamily.com and Sparks.com.