Peek Raises $5 Million in New Round of Financing

Start-ups like Uber and Airbnb have succeeded in moving traditionally offline businesses like taxis and apartment subletting to the Internet.

Now Peek.com, which is aiming to do the same for planning travel itineraries, has gotten a little more help in reaching that goal.

The start-up plans to announce on Wednesday that it has raised $5 million in a new round of fund-raising, taking money from the likes of Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital and Jeff Fluhr, a cofounder of StubHub.

They are joining a group that already includes prominent tech veterans like Eric Schmidt of Google and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, many of whom reinvested in the round.

Behind their investments is their belief that a company can both make it easier for travelers to find attractions like wine tours quickly and easily and for merchants, especially those without websites, to reach potential customers much more quickly.

In essence, Peek.com is playing both travel agent and tour guide.

The model, according to chief executive Ruzwana Bashir, is Opentable, which has focused as much on providing restaurants with backend systems as it has with helping diners book reservations.

“What we saw is that the industry was really offline and fragmented,” Ms. Bashir said in a telephone interview. “What we wanted to do is invest in a bunch of tours and bring the industry online.”

She declined to give specifics about the company’s financial performance or valuation, but noted that the company reported double-digit month-on-month growth last year.

Peek.com has grown to 17 cities in the United States, as well as London and Paris, over the past two years. Now it plans to use its latest fund-raising round to expand into at least 10 more locations this year, including Mexico, Ms. Bashir said.

To help finance that growth, management spent about six weeks talking to prospective investors â€" many of whom had wanted to get into the company’s $1.25 million seed round, but couldn’t â€" and closing the fund-raising round.

“There were quite a few investors that had been reaching out to us,” Ms. Bashir said. “The whole process was pretty swift for us.”