On Wednesday, September 17, UpTake announced it received more than $10 million in new funding, including a Series B round of investment led by Trinity Ventures and Shasta Ventures, and additional backing from other sources. The new funding built on our Series A round of $4 million from Shasta Ventures announced in December 2007, when we opened the site to its first private beta users.
We will use the new funding to achieve three main objectives. First, we will expand search beyond UpTake Hotels into new categories including: UpTake Lodging, UpTake Things to Do, UpTake Restaurants and UpTake Beaches. Second, we will invest in our search technology to improve travel recommendations based on its analysis and filtering of collective intelligence. Lastly, we will pursue opportunities to grow the company through acquisitions.
We also announced a new Content Partner Program to enable publishers to provide their most up-to-date content to the UpTake visitor. UpTake partners include: BedandBreakfast.com, Restauranti.ca, OpenTable, La Quinta Inn & Suites, Away.com, and FriendCommunications, the leader in online reservations for RV parks and campgrounds.“
Here are the highlights of the media coverage resulting from the announcement:
UpTake, the travel search engine that gets its traffic from Google, takes in $10M
“Unlike many content-focused travel sites, which seem to proliferate daily (see TripWolf, IgoUgo, TripSay), UpTake has no illusions about becoming the first place people turn for travel info. It has instead built a strategy almost entirely based around aggregating high-quality content from other sources and pulling in traffic from travel searches executed on major search engines.”
UpTake Raises $10 Million in Series B Funding
“The funding round was led by Trinity Ventures, which ostensibly believes UpTake has a bright future ahead of it.”"Considering it’s competing in a well-trodden space where sites like TripConnect and TripHub have failed, it’ll be interesting to see if the travel search engine can transition from an SEO-driven strategy to a more natural uptake.”
UpTake Announces $10,000,000 investment with a new Series B
“As I reported back in May when the company entered public beta, they’re applying some interesting semantic approaches in an attempt to enhance the quality of results.”
UpTake travels in style with $10M
“Calling itself a travel search and discovery Web site, UpTake wants to be the first place travelers look when deciding where to go on vacation, where to stay and what to do. It searches more than 1,000 other travel sites and scours the Web for other travelers’ opinions to provide matches to help people make better travel decisions.”
Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal
Travel Search Site UpTake gets $10M
“UpTake said it will use the new funding expand search functions, invest in technology to improve travel recommendations based on analysis and filtering of collective intelligence, and pursue opportunities to grow the company through acquisitions.”
We are looking forward to using these funds to deliver better travel information to our visitors and as a result give them a better trip.If you need further information, we like Paul Miller’s analysis of UpTake written for our public beta announcement on The Semantic Web. If you are looking for more press and blogger information, go here.
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Media Highlights from UpTake’s Series B Announcement