Concur, the travel-and-expense software company, has acquired Hipmunk, the travel metasearch brand that was one of the early companies to graduate from the now-famous Y Combinator accelerator.
The terms of the transaction were not revealed. The San Francisco-based startup had raised nearly $55 million in investment since its launch a half-dozen years ago. Its most recent round was nearly $6 million this past spring.
Hipmunk's brand name will remain, and it will continue on as a standalone brand for consumers.
The startup arrived with a stated goal of disrupting the flight search sector. As Tnooz has previously reported, the founders said that they would take on the likes of pre-Priceline Group brand Kayak.
Kayak's CEO, Steve Hafner, retorted that Hipmunk is “roadkill”, “irrelevant”, and "unremarkable".
Hipmunk's key differentiator was aiming to offer a better user interface than what was currently available. Its "agony index" for flights popularized, and gave its own spin to, a bar-graph design first tried by ITA Software (a company later acquired by Google).
Hipmunk's "ecstasy" rating (which claims to take into account cheapest rate, highest hotel rating, and location desirability) helped users sort properties by factors not conventionally available to be sorted by at the time of launch, including such as the hotness of the nightlife in the hotel's surrounding area. (Kayak later copied the map-based move.)
Hipmunk was the first to mix Airbnb property listings with its lodging results, just as it was the first to include Amtrak in its flight/transport search results. The company also was an early experimenter in artificial intelligence-based tools, such as AI-based tools added to its hotel search last month.
While some of its innovations were adopted in various ways by competitors, consumers as a whole did not flock to its brand, en masse.
Today's news shows the brand has found a safe exit thanks to an emphasis on business travel it has been pursuing for some time. It's a happy outcome for its employees, its small but dedicated user base, and its West Coast tech press champions.
Earlier this summer: Concur talks about its next steps in travel expense dominance