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Search - Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Mobissimo - Profile

HQ: San Mateo, CA Founded: 2003 Management: Leadership is not impressively seasoned, but are young, well-educated and go way back - they met at computer camp for teenagers in Siberia. Founders are Béatrice Tarka (CEO) who previously ran Axall Media; Svetlozar Nestorov, (President of Technology) who is currently on leave from his position as an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Svetlozar holds a B.S in Mathematics and B.S, M.S, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. Lucia Carniglia (Travel Consultant) is a Milanese hotelier. Investors: Company raised seed funding of $1M in April 2004 from Cambrian Ventures\, Index Ventures, and Benhamou Global Ventures. Business Model: Meta-search engine for travel that crawls Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, et al. It does not handle transactions, rather it is building an advertising business and gets a small cut from the transaction engines as an affiliate. Company has been adept at getting the press to describe it as a Google for travel. Competition: Yahoo in July acquired travel search engine FareChase for an undisclosed sum. Other travel meta search engines are SideStep and Kayak Software. Dirt: Online travel has been a very sweet sector for startups and we... Continue...