Skift raises additional $1.1M seed round

Travel news startup was founded by paidContent CEO Rafat Ali

Travel news startup Skift has raised an additional $1.1 million, it was announced in a blog post Wednesday. 

The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures and included Ironfire Angel, MESA+, Advancit Capital, Growlab/LX Ventures, who invested together. New angels investing in this round include Jason Calacanis, Michael Cunniff, Duncan Jennings, Sean Keener, Shakil Khan, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Noglows, and Michael Yavonditte. The new funding brings the company's total seed round to $1.5 million.

Some of Skift's previous angel investors include Chris Ahearn, Luke Beatty, Gordon Crovitz, Craig Forman, Jim Friedlich, Tom Glocer, Vishal Gondal, Jason Hirschhorn, Peter Horan, David Lerner, Alan Meckler, Mohamed Nanabhay, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Amol Sarva, Chris Schroeder, and few undisclosed investors.

The company says that it will be using this funding to double its staff from 5 to 10, hiring additional developers, audience development, editorial and sales professionals. It will also be building out its initial sales infrastructure, and continuing to build its data services.

New York City-based Skift was founded in 2012 by Rafat Ali, who was the founder and CEO of paidContent, and Jason Clampet, who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com.

Skift is a travel intelligence company, which offers news, information, data and services to professionals in the travel industry, as well as travelers, regarding airlines, hotels, resorts and startups, in order to help them make smarter decisions about travel. The name Skift comes from the Nordic word for “shift," “change” or “transformation.” 

While there are other "old school business-to-business" companies out there offering travel information, Ali said in an interview with VatorNews, they "haven't figured out digital."

Skift, on the other hand, is "digital native."

"We have connected the dots, and brought the different travel sectors together in a way that the old school companies have not been able to," said Ali.

The company currently makes money from advertising, but will eventually use the intelligence it gathers, including metrics and data, to sell a subscription fee too travel industry brands.

The first phase of Skift's data collection is social, which it currently offers in SkiftSocial, a data dashboard for brands, which it launched in February.

The dashboard combines metrics from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Klout and YouTube to create a window that allows brands to discover the latest patterns and trends, and gain insight into how companies project themselves on social media.

For example, the total audience for the brands tracked by Skift have seen over 128 billion likes, and over 39 billion Twitter followers. 

In the last two weeks, American Airlines has sent out 9,670 Tweets from its AAdvantage and AmericanAir accounts, making it the number one airline on Twitter. Its 350 posts and replies on Facebook, though, put it at number nine in the category. The site shows how the company is using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

The service is currently free, but it will eventually be paired up with other data, including mobile and search, and will only be available for paid customers.

Skift expects to see over a half a million unique users in May 2013, across all of its platforms and a full 25% of Skift’s audience traffic now comes from mobile.

"At a time when investors are leery of both travel companies and content companies, Rafat and the Skift team have created a model that's immediately viable and valuable. Skift sees the business of information differently and it's impressive that they are showing rapid traction," Eric Hippeau, Managing Director at Lerer Ventures, said in a statement.

(Image source: m.skitf.com)