A travel planning site called Hipmunk has raised $20 million in funding

Flight and hotel search startup Hipmunk is announcing that it has raised $20 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Oak Investment Partners. Hipmunk co-founder and CEO Adam Goldstein told me that he’d been looking to raise money from a firm that had experience in consumer travel, and Oak fit that description because it previously backed flight search service Kayak. Oak general partner Ren Riley is joining Hipmunk’s board of directors. Founded in 2010 by Goldstein and CTO Steve Huffman (who also co-founded Reddit), Hipmunk quickly became my flight search engine of choice, and not just because the company’s chipmunk logo/mascot is ridiculously cute. Instead of giving users a long list of options, Hipmunk presents them with a colorful grid, and instead of focusing on price, it also allows users to sort results based on “agony” (which combines price, flight duration, and number of layovers). The Y Combinator-incubated company quickly added a hotel search, which used a similar sorting principle, except this time it was “ecstasy” instead of “agony.”