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UpTake Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding
UpTake, a travel search engine that specializes in helping users find travel ideas by taking a semantic approach to indexing destination descriptions and user comments across the Web, announced today that it has raised $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. An initial look at the site’s stat shows that it is growing at a decent clip, but still very small.
According to comScore data, the site had 150,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, which was slightly below its July performance. CEO Yen Lee explains that the slowdown in August was likely due to the site’s switch from its previous name, Kango, and notes that traffic has been growing 30 percent every month. More than 90 percent of that comes from organic search and SEO. He says:
Our business model works because we can be found where 73% of consumers start their travel research – in web search.
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.
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Angie’s List Gets $35 Million in New Investment From Battery Ventures
Everybody’s got an opinion, and if you can collect them together that can be worth quite a bit of money. Angie’s List, one of the largest sites for local service provider ratings, has received $35 million from Battery Ventures, bringing its total funding to $48M. Battery will now hold a minority stake in the company.
Angie’s List was founded in 1995, and provides users with customer reviews on a variety of services, including plumbers, roofers, and handymen. The site has over 600,000 members in the United States, and it soon plans to expand abroad. Users must pay a fee starting at $35 a year to access content, but free trials are granted for a year in cities that have been added to the site recently. According to comScore, its traffic has been flat, with only 214,000 unique visitors in February.
Angie’s List had previously received $13 million in funding, largely from Aquent and BV Capital. Battery Ventures manages almost $3 billion in capital. Competitors to Angie’s List include Yelp and Kudzu.
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