Digital Cost Cutter Coupons.com Raises $200 Million

If 1967?s The Graduate was remade today, the advice to the confused Benjamin Braddock upon graduating might have been ?Coupons. There?s a great future in coupons.?

Coupons.com, which says digital coupons have grown from 1% of all redeemed coupons to 10% in the last three years, announced Thursday that it has raised $200 million from institutional investors. That comes just a week after high-flying Groupon filed for an IPO likely to be valued in the neighborhood of $15 to $20 billion.

According to a source close to the deal, investors valued the 13 year-old company at $1 billion, putting the little known Coupons.com company in the same Billion Dollar Pre-IPO club as Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, and possibly Square.

It?s not clear if Coupons.com, which hasn?t taken venture capital, is profitable, but revenues for 2011 are estimated to be $100 million, double the $50 million from 2010, according to the same source.

But Coupons.com CEO Steven Boal says it?s no Groupon clone, businesses that basically sell gift certificates at a discount to customers.

?What we do almost exclusively is issuance of real coupons like the ones in the newspaper,? Boal said. Tens of thousands of sites around the web offer coupons powered by Coupons.com, and even HP printers now come with a built-in coupon printing button powered by his company.

Newspapers declining circulation and the aging of its audience has left Coupons.com with a huge opening on the web, on Facebook and in apps. Already the company handles online coupons for chains that have a combined 44,000 retail locations in the U.S..

?Guess how many fans Oreo Cookies has on Facebook? 18 million,? Boal said. ?They can reach more consumers via Facebook than through the newspapers.?

And his company?s coupons are redeemed about 18% of the time ? compared to less than 1% for newspaper coupons, according to Boal.

The company is taking the VC cash ? and splitting it ? half going to investors and employees, much as Groupon and Facebook have done as a way to delay IPOing without antagonizing employees.

The other hundred million is for adding 100 employees to the 300-strong current staff, growing their operations, buying small companies and consolidating in a headquarters in Mountain View.

In 2009, Coupons.com bought Grocery IQ, an app that lets shoppers get coupons as they make their grocery lists at home, a very common way for Americans to shop. Coupon.com?s tech team is led by its CTO Steve Horowitz, a Silicon Valley veteran who was key to early Android efforts at Google. Boal says to expect Coupons.com to work with NFC chips in smart phones so users can simply swipe their phone at a register to redeem a coupon.

Boal says his company has flown under the radar in Silicon Valley for 13 years, but now it?s time to change that.

?72 percent of Americans use coupons annually,? Boal said. And Coupons.com?s demographic isn?t elderly shut-ins waiting for double-coupon day, according to Boal. Instead it?s closer to affluent, home-owning women ? a demographic that companies want to reach.

Coupons.com and its investors are clearly betting that in a tough economic climate and with the continued decline in newspapers, the demand for online coupons will only keep growing.

?We didn?t raise $200 million to create demand,? Boal said. ?We raised it to satisfy demand.?

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/L048RUw_zkI/

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