UK travel start-up Top10.com has secured $8m of investment to expand its recommendation-based hotel booking system.
The company has closed a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Forward Partners and Idealab.
As part of the deal, Balderton Capital partner Daniel Waterhouse will join the Top10.com board alongside Sonali De Rycker of Accel Partners.
Top10.com
Launched 12 months ago, Top10.com aims to save people time when searching for a hotel by aggregating deals from OTAs like Booking.com, Lastminute.com, LateRooms.com and Expedia and giving users a list of ten accommodation choices based on their specific requirements.
“Hotel booking and travel review sites contain an overwhelming amount of information,” said co-founder and chief executive of Top10.com, Tom Leathes.
“Top10.com cuts through this noise by simplifying the whole experience. We limit results to just 10 hotels whilst providing a wealth of relevant information in a bite-sized format.”
Leathes told BigHospitality company has also been focusing on integration with social media for a truly personalised experience.
“For example, we have done an integration with Four Square where we publish tips that people have left for a given hotel, which is the kind of easy-to-digest snippet of info we thing is more fun than reading long form TripAdvisor reviews,” he explained.
“The exciting thing about information from social media is that it lets us personalise the experience much more than you can from other data. We ultimately want to get to an entirely personalised experience.”
Mobile strategy
The website is already driving over $1million worth of hotel bookings a month, half of which are from mobile devices.
Leathes said the investment from Balderton Capital would give Top10.com the capital and expertise to push this mobile strategy harder and expand further into Europe.
