Local review site Yelp.com announced tonight that it has taken $10 million in Series B funding from Benchmark Capital. The company received as much as $6 million in a previous round from Bessemer Venture Partners. You can read our previous coverage of Yelp here. Other consumer web investments by Benchmark include Metacafe, Shopping.com, Rebtel, Bebo and Pageflakes.
Yelp is reporting 1.5 million unique visitors last month, twice the traffic it saw in January. Local reviews are a valuable activity online and Yelp faces competition from startups like Judy’s Book and local search with reviews included from all the big players. Alexa, for what it’s worth, finds twice as much traffic for Yelp as it does for Judy’s Book. Judy’s Book raised $8 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Ackerley Partners at the end of last year.
This summer Yelp added a mobile version of its service and was named one of the 50 coolest sites on the web by Time.