XO Group Acquires “Ambience Search Engine” Hoppit

Hoppit, a search engine that lets you find restaurants based on their atmosphere, today announced that it has been acquired by the “lifestage media” company XO Group (formerly known as “The Knot”). Hoppit will join XO Group’s lineup of wedding- and marriage-related brands, including The Knot, The Nest, The Bump, WeddingChannel.com and GiftRegistry360.com.

“Together, we now embark on a mission to make finding products and services incredibly fast, relevant, and beautiful during life stages, i.e. preparing for a wedding or having a baby,” the company told its users in a blog post today. “The entire Hoppit team is excited to join the market leader in this endeavor.”

As Hoppit’s founder and CEO Steven Dziedzic told me earlier this week, Hoppit itself will remain alive “for the foreseeable future.” The team, however, will also work on applying the service’s technology to all of XO Group’s brands “to make finding products and services incredibly fast, relevant, and beautiful during life stages like wedding planning (The Knot), new home nesting (The Nest), and first time parenthood (The Bump).”

Hoppit launched its service publicly in early 2012 and took about $500,000 in seed funding from a diverse group of investors, including Aimee Higgins, Earl Tucker III, Phil Landler, Graham Smith and Dziedzic. The project was incubated — and this is not a joke — at the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York after the team wasn’t accepted into TechStars but won a Christian business competition.

Since its launch as an iOS and web service, the company added an Android app to its lineup late last year, but it’s been pretty quiet around the company since. The service, Dziedzic told me, eclipsed 100,000 unique users since its launch in 50 cities and was growing at about 8-10% per month. XO Group approached the company while it was in the process of raising its first institutional funding round.