Tenacious Rearden Commerce Gets Huge Funding

It's amazing to see the news that Rearden Commerce -- a company most of the population never heard of -- has landed $100 million in funding. I first met and talked with CEO Patrick Grady about his dream of building a Web-based personal assistant back in 2003 -- when he informed me that he'd already been working on it for three years. Not many tech entrepreneurs are tenacious enough to stick with such a difficult project for so long.

Here's what I wrote about Rearden in 2005 for USA Today, and the company has stuck to this vision:

Rearden, a Web service for travel, has about 500,000 corporate users so far. The site acts a lot like a human travel agent. You tell it your preferences -- hotels downtown, non-stop flights and so on. Rearden also knows corporate preferences -- preferred airlines, hotel cost limits -- for the company as a whole and for every individual user.

When you want to book a trip, you say when and where, and Rearden can query thousands of airline, hotel and other travel websites and cross-reference them with individual and corporate settings. It could pull in non-travel items, too, such as listings from local jazz clubs during the time you'd be in that city.

Then Rearden can assemble all the pieces on a screen on your computer and let you make final decisions.

"The Web ought to be an always-on personal assistant," says Rearden's Grady. "It ought to know who you are and where you are and understand the context of what you're trying to do, and do things on your behalf."

Though Rearden, as are most Web services, is mainly a corporate offering today, look for the technology to race into the consumer market in 2006.

Rearden, it seems, has reached its tipping point. It sells services to 1,700 companies, up from 92 a couple years ago. After all this time, Grady is ready for take-off.

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