HispanicBusiness

Elicit, a Chicago-based startup that makes technology to improve searching within websites, said Tuesday that it has raised $1.5 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

The company was founded by Adam and Eric Heneghan,brothers who have run digital marketing agencies for 20 years.

Their current agency, Elevation, counts companies such as Orbitz, Exelon and Pella as clients. The Heneghans have been working on Elicit as a separate company for two years. The $1.5 million in funding comes from investors including Greycroft Partners, First Round Capital, ff Ventures and L3, the investment vehicle of Buddy Media founder and Chief Executive Michael Lazerow. All of Elicit's investors are based on the East or West Coasts.

Elicit is a software-as-a-service company, meaning customers pay a monthly licensing fee for the technology. Elicit's software is designed to give marketers control over on-site search results because "the search box should be as well-informed as anything from a marketing perspective," said Adam Heneghan. For example, if a site is running display ads for a specific campaign, the Elicit technology can display related links high up in the results when a consumer is searching for certain terms. The Heneghans say their technology also cuts down on site abandonment, which happens when visitors are sent to a page from a search engine such as Google, but then leave in frustration when they can't find the information they want within a site.

"The idea that we're really focusing on (is) how do we provide the best possible (search) results to users using their words to describe products and (get) them much further down the funnel than they are today," said Adam Heneghan. "Users abandon search because of bad results. It requires a lot of energy on the end users' part to increase the relevancy of search results."

Elicit said it will use the funding to accelerate sales and marketing efforts. Before taking the venture capital investment, the Heneghans had funded the startup themselves.