Tours and activities startup Peek has raised $10 million in fresh investment, bringing its total financing to $18 million.
This latest financing round for the San Francisco-based startup includes investors Pete Flint, David Bonderman, Ray Lane, Gigi Pritzker, and Michael Pucker.
Flint, the founder and CEO of Trulia, the real estate search site, and one of the founders ofLastMinute.com, has joined the company’s board. He said in a statement:
“I see lots of similarities with Peek and Trulia, as both companies empower small businesses and are laser-focused on providing the best possible experience for their customers, and there are compelling network effects.”
Today Peek also announced that it has signed a marketing partnership with Yelp, the local listings platform with 160 million monthly visitors. Any tour operator who has a listing on Yelp and who uses the Peek Pro tool for suppliers will automatically see a “book now” button added to their Yelp listings page. The instant booking system is powered by Peek.
Yelp and Peek both have an emphasis on listings in North America, so there is a large overlap in the databases, Peek said.
Since 2015, Yelp has signed similar partnerships with companies like Hipmunk, the travel metasearch platform (see the Tnooz story), CellarPass, the online reservations system for wineries and breweries, and Tablelist, for nightclub reservations.
In the last six months, Peek says it has seen its number of bookings quadruple. Since launch, it says it has sent “hundreds of millions of dollars of bookings through its platform.”
Earlier this year, the company released an Android app of its B2B tool. It already had a version for iPhone and iPad.
The company has added functions to the Peek Pro system, like the ability for operators to email waivers to customers in advance of an activity’s start (such as for a kayaking trip), automating customers locating their nearest pick-up location, and reducing chargebacks through additional fraud prevention software.
Late last year, TripAdvisor investigated Peek for suggesting a system it has could be used by owners to ensure only positive feedback appears on review sites. Peek altered its product so that its SmartReview feature no longer falls foul of TripAdvisor guidelines.
The startup has 80 employees and plans to use some of the funding to expand the staff at its second office in Utah. For more on the company’s journey, see Tnooz’s Q&A with CEO Ruzwana Bashir from November 2015.
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