Hipmunk Raises $15M Series B, Promises Big Product Improvements

My favorite travel site Hipmunk just announced that it has raised $15 million in a Series B round of funding.

The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and IVP parter Todd Chaffee will be joining the Hipmunk board. Previous investor Ignition Partners also invested.

In his blog post announcing the round, CEO and co-founder Adam Goldstein says that the IVP investment is a particularly noteworthy as a “vote of confidence”, since the firm normally invests in later-stage rounds.

Hipmunk offers a different way of searching for flights — laying them out in a grid that makes it easy to compare a bunch of flights at once, and allowing users to sort them in a way that minimizes “agony” (for example making it easier to avoid longer flights or flights with multiple layovers). Since its launch in 2010, Hipmunk has also released iPhone and Android apps, to which it recently added hotel search and calendar integration

Hipmunk has now raised about $20 million total. As for what the company will to do with the money, Goldstein says he plans to hire in engineering, business development, and marketing. He also declares his intention to “go big or go home” which means “building a product that’s more complete than any other tool.” So we’ll see some big product announcements in the next few months.

Goldstein also says that for now, Hipmunk won’t be expanding outside of travel.