Another illustration that mobile and hotel distribution is changing with news that Europe-based same-day booking service Blink Booking has raised money from a string of web luminaries.
The investment of $2.5 million comes as the company launches the service in the UK after successfully extending the service in seven countries including France, Spain and Italy.
The capital comes from Brent Hoberman’s PROFounders (which also counts Active Hotels founder Andy Phillipps on its investment team), SoftTechVC and Ballpark Ventures.
SoftTech has invested in the likes of Seesmic, Mashery and Fotopedia, while PROFounders has pumped money into travel brands such as GetYourGuide, CruiseWise, Roomorama and OneFineStay.
The service work similar to that of the HotelTonight platform in the US, allowing users of its mobile applications (iPhone and Android) to find and book same-day hotel deals via their handsets.
Blink only picks four and five star properties and is now featuring hotels in around 40 cities across Europe.
The company claims to have worked with 500 properties on the continent so far and its apps have been downloaded 170,000 times in its launch market of Spain.
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About Kevin May
Congrats to Rebeca and her team. You picked some great investors
@Kevin: Please add the r to “GetYourGuide”. Thanks
@johannes – ha! fixed.
‘web luminaries’
oh please
do they ever back analyse portfolios and businesses of so called a list investors to work out how successful they really were?
@eric – turning into quite the spiky commenter recently, aren’t you
I’m sure Blink and other startups getting funded do their due diligence on their backers too. That’s just common sense.
oh, so it was blink that called their own investors a listers and web luminaries
@eric – no, it was me.
what’s your point?
we are perfectly entitled to name the former-CEO and founder of lastminute.com, who is now a high profile investor in travel and digital companies, an A-lister.