Duetto Research, a startup bringing a “big data” approach to the travel industry, has just raised $2.1 million in seed funding.
The company hasn’t launched yet, but co-founder and CEO Patrick Bosworth says the goal is to build applications around customer demand data from large travel companies. It’s starting out by serving small- and medium-sized lodging businesses (who could, for example, use the data to help with pricing and distribution strategies), and Bosworth plans to go live for Duetto’s first customers this summer. Eventually, he says he wants to help “companies in all travel verticals respond to changing market conditions and market demand.”
Bosworth previously worked as director of yielding and business strategy at Wynn Las Vegas, where his co-founder Marco Benvenuti was executive director of enterprise strategy. Duetto’s third co-founder, Craig Weissman, was CTO at Salesforce.com until June of last year.
There’s a big list of impressive investors. The round was led by Dan Scholnick from Trinity Ventures, with participation from Battery Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Individual investors include Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, his co-founder Parker Harris, Expedia co-founder Rich Barton, entrepreneur and author Steve Blank, and many others. Here’s the full list:
Travel Investors
Mark Lomanno: former CEO of Smith Travel Research (STR)
Quest Hospitality Ventures: investor in Nor1, Hipmunk, bCODE, newBrandAnalytics, ID90T
Brad Gerstner: Board Member at Nor1, Orbitz, Hotel Tonight, Room 77, Off & Away
Paul Reeder: Board Member, current or former, at ITA, Orbitz and USAirways
Rich Barton: former CEO/Co-Founder of Expedia, venture partner at Benchmark Capital
Michael Reichartz: CMO at Allegiant Air, former executive at Expedia
Sam Shank: CEO/Founder at Hotel Tonight
Ash Kapur: Vice President of Revenue Management at Starwood Capital Group
Nikhil Srivastava
Technology Investors
Marc Benioff: Chairman/CEO at Salesforce.com
Steve Blank: Founder at e.Piphany, entrepreneurship author, lecturer at UC Berkeley
Parker Harris: Founder at Salesforce.com
Todd McKinnon: Founder/CEO at Okta, formerly at Peoplesoft, Salesforce.com and Facebook
Ross Fubini: Founder/CTO at CubeTree, Advisor at Palantir, Investor at Kapor Investments
Harlan Robins: biotech entrepreneur
Duetto Research provides hotel executives with cutting-edge solutions to optimize demand, maximize rate, and minimize cost. Powered by leading Silicon Valley technologists and hospitality industry veterans, Duetto is where innovation and insight meet – to help the hotel industry create new standards of efficiency and profitability, and re-think how revenue management is done. Founded by former Salesforce.com CTO Craig Weissman and travel industry experts Marco Benvenuti and Patrick Bosworth, we raised $10 million in Series A funding in December 2012...
Founded in 1986, Trinity Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm dedicated to partnering with passionate entrepreneurs to transform revolutionary ideas into reality. With over $1 billion under management, Trinity Ventures believes in personal engagement, mutual respect and goal alignment with the entrepreneurs. Trinity focuses on early stage and seed technology investments with particular emphasis on social commerce and entertainment, digital media, Saas, and cloud and infrastructure. Trinity Ventures has invested in such leading companies as Aruba Networks,...
Benchmark is an early stage venture capital firm focusing in Social, Mobile, Local and Cloud companies that disrupt various industries. Founded in 1995, the firm has offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, California. The firm has been recognized for its commitment to open source and is noted for creating the first equal ownership and compensation structure for its partners. General partners are Matt Cohler, Bruce Dunlevie, Peter Fenton, Bill Gurley, Kevin Harvey, and Mitch Lasky. Since its founding...
Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is regarded as the leader of what he has termed “The End of Software,” the now-proven belief that multi-tenant, on-demand applications democratize information by delivering immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that...
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