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Jetpac Raises $2.4M Series A

2012-07-16
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Jetpac, which in April launched its top-rated iPad app for inspiring travel slideshows, raised $2.4 million in Series A funding from leading investors, including Khosla Ventures.
Jetpac today announced it has raised $2.4 million in Series A funding from leading investors, including Khosla Ventures, Internet Entrepreneur Jerry Yang, and Morado Venture Partners. The company, which in April launched its top-rated iPad app for inspiring travel slideshows, also today released a new version of the Jetpac app with more ways to explore friends' photos.

"Jetpac has a proven team and a disruptive approach to a massive untapped opportunity in the travel app space," said Andrew Chung, partner at Khosla Ventures. "By allowing users to discover destinations through the eyes of their friends within a visually stunning iPad app, Jetpac strikes an emotional chord that will keep them coming back for travel inspiration. The company's CEO, Julian Green, truly understands the intersection of social travel discovery and photo browsing, and its CTO, Pete Warden, brings outstanding technical smarts as an ex-Apple big data wizard."

The free app's brand new "Atlas" views let people easily explore their friends' favorite places, as well as each friend's best travel images. Jetpac, which has already indexed over 750 million Facebook photos, now lets people search for a particular destination to see who has been there, learn about friends' travel styles, and pick the right friends to ask for the scoop. Despite the fact that an overwhelming 200,000 photos are shared with the average Facebook user, Jetpac's algorithms are fine-tuned to pinpoint the very best 10 percent of these travel images from trusted friends.

"Jetpac is like having an old 1960′s carousel slideshow with all of your friend's best travel photos, but with the ability to jump straight to the places and friends you want," said Julian Green, co-founder and CEO of Jetpac. "According to Think with Google, travelers trust their friends' recommendations for two-thirds of the places they go, so Jetpac delivers travel information that's not just fun, inspiring, and visually stunning, but also useful."

With Jetpac, people can browse leisurely through their friends' travel photos, build a "bucket list" of places they want to visit, and reminisce about places they've been. Purpose-built for the iPad, Jetpac shows off the tablet as the perfect picture frame. Users just lean back, touch and swipe through gorgeous slideshow galleries on the high resolution screen.

"With 250 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day, finding useful information among your friends' travel images is a real big data challenge," said Jerry Yang. "With its new funding, Jetpac will be able to provide even more ways for travel enthusiasts to find inspiration."

Jetpac was founded by a stellar group of technology executives from companies like Apple, eBay and StubHub. The company's CEO, Julian Green, previously co-founded Houzz, the number one home design iPad app, and ran StubHub and ProStores businesses at eBay. Since his early days as an Apple engineer, Jetpac CTO Pete Warden has authored two O'Reilly books on Big Data, uncovered the iPhone tracking story in 2011, and founded OpenHeatMap.

About Jetpac

Launched in April 2012 as a fun way to find useful photos from friends' travels, Jetpac is the place to start for travel inspiration on the iPad. It serves as a picture guide organized by destination and friend, providing beautiful slideshow galleries of the best high resolution travel images shared on Facebook. The highest rated travel app on the iPad, Jetpac was founded by Julian Green, co-founder of the top-rated free iPad app for home design inspiration, and big data expert Pete Warden. Jetpac is funded by Khosla Ventures and Internet Entrepreneur Jerry Yang. Download Jetpac in the App Store, or visit www.jetpac.com for more information.
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