Personalized hotel recommendation startup OLSET raises $1.1 million

OLSET, which offers personalized recommendations for hotels, has raised $1.1 million of seed funding on a convertible note. The lead investor was Todd Kimmel from Montage Ventures. About half of the round came from Montage and Digital Garage, a firm that happens to also own the largest review site in Japan (4travel.jp). Other investors include 500 Startups, Plug & Play Tech Ventures, XG Ventures, Principle Innovation, Merced Partners, and a number of angels. 

OLSET wants to make travel better for the business workers tasked with planning their own trips through online travel sites. And to do so, it’s just raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The company was founded to provide a platform that enables business travelers to search for accommodations, and match them up with the three most highly ranked hotels based on a number of factors. OLSET takes into account the customer’s history of travel, as well as some other social signals, to create a personalized ranking for each individual user. And like most big data, machine-learning type algorithms, the platform only gets smarter with time. That’s due in part to an increase in the amount of personal data it collects, but also to the amount of information it collects over time from various services around the web. It scours travel ratings and recommendations sites for various reviews and information about hotels, and categorizes listings based on the information provided.