BuyBuddy Secures $4.5M From XDL Intervest

On September 25, 2000, BuyBuddy, Inc. secured a $4.5 million investment from venture capital firm XDL Intervest Capital. The proceeds from this preferred share issue will assist BuyBuddy in its strategy to become a dominant market player through doubling the number of employees at its online comparison shopping service. In addition to XDL Intervest, BuyBuddy’s major shareholders include Internet.com Corporation, a NASDAQ-traded provider of global real-time news and information resources for the Internet industry.

Concurrent with its announcement of the financing, BuyBuddy stated that it had signed partnership agreements with both Bell Mobility and Clearnet Communications Inc. to provide wireless comparison shopping to their mobile subscribers, and an agreement with Excite Canada to provide comparison shopping to users of Excite.ca and Excite for @Home. These announcements came soon after BuyBuddy signed a wireless agreement with Rogers AT&T Wireless and, say company spokespersons, serve to strengthen the company’s market potential as the leading global provider of community-driven commerce solutions.

BuyBuddy offers online comparison shopping by providing consumers access to merchants offering music, gaming, computer, electronics and video products and enabling them to find the best online price for products. Subscribers to BuyBuddy can call an online merchant directly to place an order or leverage their knowledge of competitive pricing to negotiate a better price in a “bricks and mortar” environment.

BuyBuddy was represented by a team from Torys which included Barry Reiter, Jay Duffield, Jeremy Fraiberg, Jeff Davis and Chris Medland. XDL was represented by a team from McCarthy Tétrault consisting of David Ma and Chris Hoffmann.