The Infatuation raises $30M from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo to bring Zagat into the digital age

WndrCo, the consumer technology investment and consumer company founded by Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, invested $ 30 million in The Infatuation, a restaurant discovery platform.

The Infatuation hit the waves this year when it bought Zagat. Google, which paid $ 151 million for the company for 40 years in 2011. Despite efforts to renew the Zagat application, the search giant finally decided to download the perennial restaurant review and recommendation service and focus on expanding its Database of restaurant recommendations organically.

The Infatuation, based in New York, was founded by music industry veterans Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal in 2009. Previously, it raised $ 3.5 million for its mobile application, events, newsletter and recommendation tool Personalized based on SMS.

Stang told TechCrunch this morning that they plan to use a good portion of the funds to develop the new Zagat platform that will be kept up to date.

"The first thing we want to do before building something is to spend a lot of time researching how people have used Zagat in the past, how they want to use it in the future, what community" The managed platform could look and apply and community ratings to the brand, "said Stang, executive director of The Infatuation." Zagat's roots lie in user-generated content. … What we are doing now is to think what that looks like with the new technology applied. What it seems in the digital age. How [we can] takes our experience in the domain and that legendary brand and creates something new with it. "

Infatuation will also expand to new cities starting this fall with launches in Boston and Philadelphia. a dozen US cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco The first and only international location of the startup is London.

Katzenberg, who began his career in Hollywood at Paramount Pictures, began to raise Up to $ 2 billion for WndrCo about a year ago, since then, he has presented WndrCo's new mobile video startup, NewTV, which has raised $ 1 billion and has hired Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of Hewlett Packard. , as CEO.

In addition to that, WndrCo has invested in Mixcloud, Axios, Node, Flowspace, Whistle Sports, TYT Network and others.

Taking into account the experience of the founders of The Infatuation in the entertainment industry, a partnership with Katzenberg was natural.

"We really felt that between the content and the technology they had … experience on both sides," Stang said. "Infatuation is at its best when great content intersects with great technology, finding a background that suits perfectly that was exciting."

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