Retty books $3.2 million funding for social restaurant finder service

Restaurant finder and booking service Retty has cooked up yet another major round of funding to help it grow. According to The Bridge, Retty’s series B funding is worth $3.2 million.

The Retty site and mobile apps – which we first looked at back in 2011 – plug into your social contacts to show you the best restaurants. The idea is that what your friends say about a place is much more reliable than what strangers are saying on Yelp or some other directory site. Plus, Retty allows online bookings for restaurant chains with which it has partnerships.

Retty is still fairly small, with one million monthly unique visitors on its website, dwarfed by Japanese rivals like Tabelog, which has 40 million hungry people checking out its site every month. Plus, mobile-only, multi-lingual social apps like Burpple are making it easier to browse food venues based on your friends’ photos and recommendations.

The series B money comes from Itochu Ventures, Mizuho Capital, and other undisclosed investors. Retty’s first big funding round came in October 2012, which involved $1.2 million from GREE Ventures, NTT Investment Partners, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital.

Retty has apps for iOS and Android.

(Source: The Bridge)

(Editing by Josh Horwitz)