Yelp, Inc.

Yelp, Inc. is a company that operates yelp.com, a social networking, user review, and local search web site. Yelp.com has more than 39 million monthly unique visitors as of late 2010.

History

Yelp was one of three projects, including Adzaar and Slide, to come out of the San Francisco incubator, MRL Ventures. The project arose out of research into the local services market by David Galbraith, who worked with Jeremy Stoppelman on the early stages of the project and chose its name as a contraction of Yellow Pages. Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, both of whom were early software engineering employees at PayPal, Yelp launched its namesake web site into the San Francisco market in October 2004. The company received $6 million in early funding from venture capital firms Mission Street, led by another former Paypal-er Max Levchin, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Additional investments were made in the amounts of $3 million by Benchmark Capital in 2006 by DAG Ventures ($3 million) and a private Investor from Laguna Beach ($5 million) in 2008. Yelp expanded from its San Francisco roots to open...
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