Shopping-related search engine Milo lands $4M

Milo.com, which operates an online shopping website focused on local stores, raised $4 million in funding last week, although co-founder and CEO Jack Abraham says he doesn’t yet know how the company is going to make a profit.

The Series A round was led by True Ventures and more than a dozen returning individual investors, including Ron Conway, an early investor in Google and PayPal; Keith Rabois, an investor in YouTube, Yelp and LinkedIn; and Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com. The company raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the angel investors last year.

The startup, which lets users search the inventories of local stores to see whether they have products they’re looking for, was started out of frustration, Abraham says.

“I do the majority of my shopping locally, and it’s hard to figure out what’s available without driving to the stores or calling them,” he says.

Milo’s search engine scans the inventories of participating retailers, such as Best Buy, Ikea and BevMo and provides users an option to purchase the product online if it’s not available in a nearby store.

So far, Milo has partnered with 42,000 stores in 30,000 communities nationwide. Abraham admits that the large wholesaler Costco is not integrated into its inventory and neither are a multitude of mom-and-pop stores. But he says that new retailers are added every month, and Abraham figures that as the site grows, retailers will be happy to pay for the privilege of having the website send motivated customers their way.

And if they won’t pay, there’s always advertising and coupons.

“We could do a Google AdWords-type model,” he says. “Ads that are useful and tied to high intent. That could make a lot of sense.” —Deborah Gage