Mike Fridgen at the Decide HQ in Queen Anne. The company's walls are painted in the lime green and blue of the Seattle Sounders.

A secretive Seattle startup by the name of Decide.com is looking to transform online shopping. That's a bold mission. But CEO Mike Fridgen is confident that Decide.com can deliver -- even though he's not sharing too many details about the company's approach at the moment.

The startup does have some serious horsepower behind it. Madrona Venture Group, an early investor in Amazon.com, and Rich Barton, a co-founder of Zillow.com and former CEO of Expedia, pumped $2.5 million into the company last summer. Oren Etzioni, the University of Washington computer science professor who helped create the technology behind Farecast and NetBot, is a co-founder and adviser.

Fridgen, a former executive at Farecast and Bing Travel who joined the startup as CEO last October, isn't saying too much about what the 16-employee startup is actually building.

"What we are doing is bringing unprecedented levels of transparency to electronics shopping," said Fridgen in an interview at the company's offices in lower Queen Anne. "We have a unique team here with skill sets around using data to uncover consumer insights ... so that's really at the heart of what we will be bringing to market."

Decide.com in many ways is a re-start of two existing companies: Eggsprout and PriceYeti. (The PriceYeti brand will start to disappear with the launch of Decide, though the giant white Yeti suit which adorns the entrance way of the company's offices will remain).

Ex-Zillow employee Brian Ma and four other techies started Eggsprout two years ago with the goal of compiling data on resumes. The startup didn't gain traction because of the challenge of compiling resumes, and as a result the entrepreneurs shifted gears into online shopping.

"Shopping was a space that we were really interested in because there is so much data. There's so much product data and so much pricing data," said Ma.

None of the code has transferred from PriceYeti to Decide.com, but Ma notes that some of the high-level concepts are the same.

Fridgen declined to say how much the company paid for the Decide.com URL, adding with a laugh that "we spent a little bit of money on that."

The $2.5 million round also will be used to launch the initial version of the service, currently slated to debut this Spring. The company will likely raise more money later this year.

Fridgen and the rest of the crew at Decide.com have big ambitions. The technology executive referenced a TechFlash story from last summer in which the question was asked: Where is Seattle's next e-commerce superstar?

"That's resonated with us," said Fridgen. "We acknowledge that we have a long way to go -- we are in the early stages."

He later added: "We have uncovered some things that are truly unique. I think you will almost (say): 'How is someone not doing this?' We've got something special here. We are just not ready to talk about it."

That's about all I could gather from Fridgen, even though I asked five or six different ways about what they are doing. Guess we'll have to wait until the launch later this Spring. Stay tuned.