Investors deliver new funding after Sameday's makeover

Accel Partners and Idealab are among the investors in privately held Sameday, one of the many consumer-focused companies that switched business models after the Internet shakeout last spring.

Sameday, which used to deliver electronics and convenience items such as music and videos to its customers' doors, dropped its consumer business in June. The Los Angeles-based company now manufactures software that helps companies manage delivery and fulfillment operations, according to Sameday spokeswoman Erin Mills.

"We intend to use the funding to continue our software developments and grow our services," Mills said.

Amid the market shakeout, many companies have dropped their efforts to sell directly to consumers, opting instead to sell their knowledge and software to other companies. Urbanfetch, for example, went from delivering goods to customers to delivering goods between companies.

But Sameday got funding amid much analyst skepticism over companies that switch business models, a move many see as a last-gasp attempt at survival for a struggling company. Last year, Value America filed for bankruptcy as an e-commerce company and announced plans to reorganize as a business-to-business model; months later its assets were bought by a distributor.

"While infrastructure is currently the only area that investors will go for I still wonder about a company reinventing itself," Keenan Vision analyst Vernon Keenan said.

Among Sameday's new customers is Learjet, which must deliver parts quickly, Mills said. Other investors in the year-old company are THLi and Ignite Group.