Trustpilot, a review community for online shoppers that debuted nearly a decade ago in Denmark and has since spread to Australia and the U.K., has gotten itself a big bag of money and is poised to make a splash in America. It’s been here for two years, but a new round of funding will be used to raise its profile.
“We’re like Yelp and TripAdvisor, except they focus on the brick and mortar world and we focus on the online business,” says Trustpilot CEO Peter Holten Muhlmann (above). “Amazon is great to use for reviews, but we’re helping all the companies that are not Amazon but need to live in a world where there is Amazon.”
Trustpilot today announced that it has raised $73.5 million in a Series D investment round that will be used to fund its U.S. expansion. Muhlmann says that Trustpilot is home to some 13 million reviews of more than 100,000 brands worldwide and that more than 10,000 consumers a day become members of the site. The company has 100 employees working out of New York.
“We expanded to the U.K. in 2010 and when that went really well, our investors said let’s give it a go in the U.S.,” Muhlmann says, noting that one of the first moves the company made was to do a licensing agreement with Google to allow it to be one of the review companies to post those little gold stars under company listings. Much of the new money will be used to upgrade the website and increase user engagement.
Trustpilot makes its money by providing a SaaS platform to companies to leverage the power of the reviews they get on Trustpilot. “Customers engage with companies at multiple touchpoints,” Mulmann says. “We help them get reviews out to wherever customers find them relevant.”
