April 01 2007

WAYN named top 100 European start up

The social networking travel site WAYN.com has been named as one of the most promising private ventures in the EU. Its recent US$11m funding by venture capitalist ECP means that it also has a strong team pushing it forward - Brent Hoberman, former founder and CEO of lastminute.com, travel experts David Soskin and Hugo Burge from Cheapflights and Andrew Critchlow and Andy Phillips form Active Hotels.

A flight search service has been added to the WAYN (where are you now?) site as part of a drive to provide more travel services to members. The flight search is run by Kayak.com.

WAYN.com has seen its community grow from 50,000 users to over 8 million in 220 countries in less than 2 years. Expanding into services of relevance to its niche community is the obvious next step for a networking site wishing to monetise its community. With the level of experience behind the site that the venture capitalists bring it sounds like this will be the first of many more steps.

You can almost see the travel companies salivating at the opportunity.

Emma Herrod