Center City automated marketing firm raises $3M

Sidecar, the automated online-marketing technology based in Center City, says it has raised $3.1 million from a network of Philadelphia investors, including Osage Venture Partners of Bala Cynwyd, Center City-based Gabriel Investments, NextStage Capital of Wayne, Innovation Ventures of Wilmington, the Pennsylvania state-funded Ben Franklin Technology Partners, the Mid-Atlantic Angel Group, Robin Hood Ventures, and Michael Rubin, founder of what is now GSI eBay and the West Conshohocken-based Kynetic online retail group.

Chief executive Andre Golsorkhi says he plans to use the money to hire "30% more staff" from his current base of around 30, including for key jobs such as data scientists, engineers, marketing, sales and product management in the next 60-90 days. The firm is expanding its offices after filling its headquarters near 13th and Sansom.

Sidecar says it is "replacing traditional marketing technologies and agencies by automatically combining website, catalog, consumer and competitive data"  to deliver program marketing across Google and Bing, comparison-shopping engines like ShopZilla, NextTag, PriceGrabber and Amazon product ads, onsite product recommendations, and email retargeting, for e-commerce businesses. "We get a percentage of the revenue we drive for our retail partners," Golsorkhi added. The idea is to "take human resources out" to increase the precision and frequency of decision making, across the entire catalog, to ultimately bring down clients' costs and boost profits.