TrustYou has ended nine years as an independent company and sold to Japanese investment and media vehicle Recruit Holdings.
Terms of the 100% equity acquisition have not been disclosed.
The deal is the first corporate activity for the Germany-based company since 2011 when it picked up a $5 million funding round (this remains it's total financial backing to date) from Credit Agricole Private Equity.
At the same time it bought ReviewAnalyst as a mechanism to enter the US market.
TrustYou started out (TLabs here) as a reputation management service for hotels but later evolved to concentrate on becoming a "guest feedback platform" that gives properties the ability to solicit and analyse feedback from guests which are then fed into a wider platform (known as TrustScore) that sits within travel and other brand sites to give users an overall picture of a product.
It claims to be collecting around 100 million reviews a year for "hundreds of thousands" of hotels around the world.
Founders Ben Jost (CEO) and Jakob Riegger will be staying with the business following the acquisition.
Jost says:
"We meticulously searched for a partner who would help support and execute TrustYou’s vision to build the world’s largest guest feedback platform while allowing us to run the company as independently as before.
"With Recruit, we found a partner that is eager to support us with its financial resources and knowledge which will give us the necessary boost to accelerate future growth, be it organically or via further acquisitions."
Recruit is no stranger to the online travel world, having made strategic investments into the likes of Trippingand Quandoo.
The company says:
"We believe that TrustYou's review management system expertise, review compilation and analysis technology, and customer base to be valuable assets for us to challenge next stage of online travel business.
"Having a tight cooperation with TrustYou, we believe that we strengthen our online travel technology business as a global wide player."