Tuesday, January 6, 2009

RatePoint adds $10M in VC to manage biz reputations

By Galen Moore

RatePoint Inc. has received $10 million in series B funding, led by new investor Castile Ventures, to expand its sales force and increase its marketing spending. The company is expanding its focus on reputation management, building on where it began as a free tool when it launched two years ago.

When former GeoTrust Inc. executives Neal Creighton and Chris Bailey launched RatePoint.com in January 2007, the site offered a free service for Internet users to find useful content among online reviews. Now, the Needham-based company is offering companies email and online surveys and marketing – with a twist. RatePoint is betting that concern about managing online reputation will grow among small- and medium-sized businesses.

RatePoint allows companies to solicit reviews from and push surveys to their customers and then manage the response to and publication of that material, Creighton said. The company aims to become a widely used standard of credibility for customer reviews published to company websites, as GeoTrust was to security.

RatePoint’s software ensures reviews are legitimate and vets its customers, Creighton said. This differentiates it from online reviews like boorah.com or yelp.com. Unlike those open-ended sites, RatePoint vets its customers, he said.

“We’re kind of like the better business bureau, not like Yelp,” Creighton said. “We have a membership criteria.”

RatePoint customers should be able to respond quickly and publicly to negative reviews using the service, which includes a customer relationship management application, he said. Companies who fall behind get put on a sort of probation. If they can’t answer customer complaints within a set time period, they are dropped from membership in the service.

“Ratepoint’s all about quality businesses not about bad businesses,” Creighton said.

Castile was joined by returning investors .406 Ventures and Prism VentureWorks LLC, who participated in the company’s $1 million seed round and $5.5 million series A round last year.

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