Alltopstartups » General Catalyst Partners

Room 77, A Hotel Search Engine Raises $10.5M In A Series B Round

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:57:58 +0000

Room 77, a hotel search engine to reveal room-specific details, today announced it has secured $10.5 million in Series B financing. The round was led by General Catalyst Partners with participation from existing institutional and angel investors, including PAR Capital Management; Sutter Hill Ventures; Felicis Ventures; Rich Barton, founder of Expedia and co-founder of Zillow; and Erik Blachford, former president of IAC Travel.

Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers.

The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room’s window using Google Earth-enabled technology.

StartX Launches 9 Stanford Startups

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:06:00 +0000

StartX formerly SSE Labs is a student start-up accelerator developed in accordance with the chartered goals of SSE to provide a premier experience in applied entrepreneurship for Stanford students.

The program is designed to help the most passionate and innovative Stanford students become better entrepreneurs and start their companies by providing a community of like-minded entrepreneurs in our SSE Labs office space, mentorship from successful Silicon Valley experts, and resources that most startups find out-of-reach.

The demo day held on June 1st at AOL’s offices, was packed with investors interested in finding the next big company from the school that hatched Google. Advisers and sponsors for StartX include Charles River Ventures, AOL, Intel Capital, Greylock Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

In its most recent batch, 107 companies applied and only 9 were accepted. These include:

Juntos Finanzas is a personal finance service specifically targeted to help immigrant Latinos manage their money.

Qwhispr is a stealthy social search company. The team is developing a new type of search engine, because they believe typical keyword search does not work adequately for social search.

6Dot Innovations provides technologies for the blind to type using a special braille keyboard and labeling kit.

PredictiveEdge is an ecommerce service that brings dynamic pricing to any online retailer. The company was co-founded by a former Amazon.com employee who worked on pricing issues.

WifiSlam is an indoor mapping and GPS company.

Kitchit is a marketplace for professional chefs. The company matches chefs with consumers who want to set up private dining events such as weddings, graduations, or home entertaining.

GameClosure is a stealthy cross-platform mobile gaming company that focuses on HTML5 games.

Leglytics is a legal document search engine. It’s designed to be simpler than others such as Lexis Nexis.

Clear Ear is a medical device company that provides what it says is a more effective way to clear ear wax.

Red Beacon Wins Startup 2010 Competition

Thomas Oppong — Sun, 23 May 2010 06:41:18 +0000

Startup 2010 is a business plan competition and one-day event about entrepreneurship and digital business that will showcase 10 top startups competing for bragging rights, buzz, and a $100,000 prize. The conference is co-hosted by Silicon Alley Insider and New York University’s Stern School of Business, with support from exclusive founding sponsor General Catalyst Partners.

A panel of VCs selected Red Beacon out of the 10 Startup Finalists..

Redbeacon lets users submit requests for jobs in almost any local service category, and forwards these requests to relevant participating service providers, who are invited to submit bids for the job and an appointment time at which they can complete it. As soon as the user selects an appointment, the service-provider is charged a 10% commission by Redbeacon. The provider performs the service and charges the user directly.