How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle? Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they’ve invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y-Combinator winter 2012 startup. The seed round that shall be announced later today will go towards hiring front-end developers and back-end engineers to make the site beautiful but simple and beef up its machine learning technology.



The site saw 250,000 page views in March and is still growing traffic by a brisk 65% every month. Investors see gold in possible business models built around the data Priceonomics crawls and ads shown to people about to make a purchase. Co-founder Rohin Dar says the startup aims to beat general search engines by immediately knowing you’re looking to buy when you type in the name or maker of a laptop, appliance, camera, or stereo.