Today Munich-based TrustYou, a provider of social media monitoring and semantic technologies for online reviews and social commerce, announced a $5 million Series A round and the acquisition of Dallas-based competitor ReviewAnalyst (Update – January 2023: The companies seem to be no longer in business under this name and we therefore deactivated the links).
The round, led by Credit Agricole Private Equity, will expand worldwide operations and bring its advanced sentiment search platform for the restaurant and travel industries to the US. The acquisition of ReviewAnalyst brings the total number of customers on the TrustYou platform to over 6,000 globally including, Hard Rock Cafes, Best Western Hotels and Starwood Hotels. In addition, businesses using the API reach more than 5 million consumers monthly with review summaries and the TrustYou Global Review ScoreTM.
The TrustYou platform monitors, in 10 different languages, all of the world’s top travel review and social media sites, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google Places, TripAdvisor, Twitter, Yelp and blogs, for user-generated content pertaining to a particular hotel and restaurant. The platform aggregates, structures, and reports opinions found in online reviews, comments, and posts and creates a comprehensive Global Review Score. TrustYou, which was founded in 2008, also offers a range of application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing travel companies and review sites to build on top of the TrustYou platform.
“As a profitable company, with millions of consumers and thousands of hospitality industry customers leveraging our data daily, the acquisition of our a long-term partner and US market leader aggressively changes the social commerce landscape…” explained Benjamin Jost, CEO and co-founder of TrustYou, “…we saw a clear gap in the market where both consumers and businesses were losing faith in reviews and ratings. With TrustYou data we take the inaccuracy and guesswork out of online reviews and bring them to a level that everyone can trust.”
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