Steve Huffman and Adam Goldstein raise $20 million in a Series C round for Hipmunk.

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Huffman and Goldstein co-founded Hipmunk, an  online travel company  with a difference in 2010.

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Steve Huffman and Adam Goldstein, co-founders of online travel portal Hipmunk have announced that they have succeeded in raising an additional $20-million  in Series C funding.

Leading the way in the funding round was venture capitalists  Oak Investment Partners who focus their activities around clean energy, healthcare,  information technology and financial service providers. The latest round of funding brings the total raised by Hipmunk to around $40 million. According to the company, this latest injection of capital will be largely utilized to expand Hipmunk’s  cross-platform strategy, whilst adding new sources of information for their clients such as local car rental services.

San Francisco -based Hipmunk was founded by Huffman and  Goldstein with a view to provide services for members of the business community who are looking for  a travel search site that will help them to reduce time spent in organizing their travel plans.

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Huffman and Goldstein formed Hipmunk with the intention  to eradicate the painful necessity of scanning never-ending lists of often irrelevant search results that anyone planning any kind of trip has to go through. To reduce the ” agony” as they describe it of planning such a trip,  Hipmunk have developed a technologies which allows the presentation of travel  search results within a visual timeline that allows people to select the best travel package for them almost at first glance, through providing “ real time”  travel information organized in a series of filters, which will allow the travel agenda planner to reach the ideal combination of  price, convenience, comfort level and in the case of travel, journey times.

Hipmunk provides their clients with what they describe  “ tongue in cheek”  as “agony” filter for flights which  is based on price, duration and the number of stops, while those looking for hotel will be able to choose the combination that suits them best by taking advantage of the “Ecstasy” filter, categorized according to the price of the room, star rating as well as customer reviews grown from TripAdvisor.com.

Hipmunk also provide valuable information on those  travelling by train and even interested in short or long term rentals, once again through a  tabbed interface system allowing for  multiple searches to be carried out at the same time, and are also on the verge of introducing a similar service for those looking for car hire.

Towards the end of 2012, to make life as simple and pleasant  as possible for their clients, , Hipmunk began to establish a network of  locally based travel writers to launch hands-on travel guides almost at the neighborhood level, instead of depending on what they describe as the second or often third hand information which other travel comparison sites offer, with their roving travel writers getting to the grassroots level as far as hotel facility information is concerned, to avoid unpleasant surprises and unexpected costs.

Another advantage in having access to highly localized information  is  Hipmunk’s ability to provide what they describe as “heat maps” for every one of the hotels on their list, which provides accurate and often individually tested information on local restaurants, entertainment as well as accessibility of the particular hotel.

Thanks to this and their  many other customer friendly services, hotel bookings through Hipmunk have grown consistently, as well as rapidly, showing a sixfold  increase over the last 12 months, also thanks to an added feature which Hipmunk introduced  during  the year which allows for   same-day hotel booking for the unexpected last-minute business trip.

In a statement announcing this  latest round of funding Adam Goldstein, emphasized the company’s intention to remain the market leaders in the next generation of travel planning, through serving all user needs, across all platforms.

Steve Huffman graduated with a degree in computer science from the University of Virginia in 2005. After graduating, Huffman  worked along with his University classmate, Alexis Ohanian, to establish Reddit that  went on to became one of the largest social news sites online.  Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast Publication in October 2006, for an undisclosed sum,  estimated to run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Adam Goldstein graduated with degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering from MIT in June 2010.

Before forming Hipmunk, Goldstein served as Chief Technology Officer at BookTour, Inc.