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Hotel-booking service Ostrovok raises funding from major industry players
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Founded in late 2010 Ostrovok.ru, Russian hotel booking service has announced raising an undisclosed amount of funding from investors with online travel industry expertise which might just be invaluable for taking Ostrovok to a new level. They included Erik Blachfold, CEO of Expedia, Gregg Brockway (Hotwire, Tripit) and Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital.
Ostrovok has previously raised $13.6 million from Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners and a long but impressive list of other investors in July 2011.
When the co-founder of Ostrovok Serge Faguet spoke at IDCEE in October 2011, he has raised a subject of growing its IT team, which currently consists of 100 developers. This is where the new funding will be spent as well. Depending on the size of the additional funding, this may mean (I speculate) that the functionality of the website is to increase, maybe even to a complete travel booking service.
Oktogo, another hotel booking service founded by Harvard alumna Marina Kolesnik in 2009 raised $5 million from Mangrove Capital (investor in Skype), ABRT and Ventech last year.
Having been launched only in July 2011 Ostrovok has a hotel database of 130 000. According to Kolesnik, Oktogo has 140 000 hotels worldwide.
Here is a full list of the investors in Ostrovok to date. The company must have an impressive board room to accomodate all the parties:
- Accel Partners
- Genreal Catalyst Partners
- Erik Blachfold
- Gregg Brockway
- Brad Gerstner
- Peter Thiel
- Founders Fund
- Atomico Mark Pincus
- Esther Dyson
- Fritz Demopoulos
- Sebastian de Halleux
- Naval Ravikant
- Felix Shpilman
- Scott Banister
- James Hong
- Sam Shank
The news has originally been reported by my colleague Vanessa Zainzinger on TechCrunch.
About the author
Natasha Starkell
Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.
Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Google+ Natasha Starkell is the founder and CEO of GoalEurope, advisory firm focusing on technology investment and software development in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to starting GoalEurope she has worked in the field of finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and offshore outsourcing at Unisys Corporation in Switzerland and United Kingdom. She has an MBA degree from London Business School. She speaks Russian, English and German. She lives in Northern Germany.
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