Top10.com builds an ultra-quick hotel discovery service that generates shortlists of 10 hotels by combining review scores, location, popularity (impressions, clicks, bookings), price and third-party content such as Foursquare and Google Street View. The service compares live prices from booking partners including Booking.com, Expedia and LateRooms and lets users further filter results by price and hotel features. The company reports driving more than 3,000 hotel bookings per month and is generating $1M per month in hotel bookings via its metasearch engine; it operates on a commission-on-bookings model. Top10.com currently employs 14 staff in London. The team plans to hire more engineers and expand across Europe by adding local language and currency support and increasing marketing and distribution. The current Top10.com product launched in February 2013 after a pivot from a broader social recommendation platform and follows an earlier exit of the founders' price-comparison business in 2011. Top10 builds aggregated "best-of" lists by having users create personal, topic-specific top-ten lists and then curating consensus rankings from that social data. Users define preferences on their lists and Top10 algorithmically combines those inputs to produce aggregated lists (for example, a Top 10 Pixar Movies list was drawn from 67 user lists). The company relies on crowdsourcing to avoid the costs of product testing, acquisition, and written reviews. Top10 was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in London. The startup recently closed its first round of funding, which it plans to use to expand the product, ramp marketing, and hire new staff. The business has faced skepticism about whether list aggregation alone can differentiate it, but investors at Accel have backed the approach and described it as solving a major consumer pain point.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Mar 2014