Room 77 is a Mountain View, California-based search engine focused on finding the lowest prices on hotel rooms and booking at the room level. Launched in February 2011, the company provides granular room details—square footage, bed type, elevator proximity, and whether rooms are connecting—and generates a Google Earth-based “Room View” showing the window vista. Its narrow focus on room-level search and booking has driven rapid adoption: the engine facilitated the booking of “hundreds of thousands” of hotel rooms in the past nine months. Room 77 cites industry data that the hotel vertical generates more than $165 billion in gross bookings annually, highlighting a large market opportunity. The company closed a $30.3M Series C that brings total invested to $43.8M and says the new capital will be used to scale its product globally. Investors in the round include Expedia and existing backers such as Sutter Hill Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Felicis Ventures, Concur Technologies, Rich Barton, Erik Blachford, and Spencer Rascoff. Room 77 indexes and crowdsources data on individual hotel rooms, including room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity, and whether a room is connecting. The site has collected data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms across 2,500 properties and generates a virtual Room View using Google Earth–enabled technology. It also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers to augment its room-level information. The company recently added the ability to book rooms on-site, surfacing prices in search results from Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Hotels.com, CheapTickets and others and allowing grid-view price/category comparisons. Room 77 launched a public beta in February and was founded by Brad Gerstner. The article reports a $13.5 million fundraising total and notes an additional undisclosed investment by Concur. Room 77 indexes detailed data on individual hotel rooms and crowdsources reviews and ratings to deliver personalized room recommendations. The site has collected data on more than 500,000 rooms across 2,500 properties and maintains property and room data in 24 markets. It generates virtual Room Views using Google Earth–enabled technology and ranks rooms with a proprietary Room Rank algorithm that scores matches by traveler preferences. The service shows room attributes such as category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and connecting-room status, and offers tips for requesting desirable rooms from hotels. Room 77 officially launched in public beta in February and is focused on indexing every room at three- to five-star hotels worldwide (about 25,000 properties). The company recently raised funding and plans to use it for further international expansion and to expand its core search platform for online and mobile hotel shopping and booking.

Total raised

$41M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Jan 2013