VentureBeat

Rearden Commerce wants to be your personal concierge on your mobile phone (our coverage).

Now its got the world’s largest travel management company, American Express, encouraging you to use it.

Rearden Commerce, which offers you a way to view and organize travel plans, personal entertainment and more with your phone, has just signed a deal with American Express to become the mobile service of choice for the credit card company’s corporate and other travel customers.

Under the deal, the credit card company will actively market the Rearden Commerce service to these customers — seeing it as a good way to keep their loyalty. The service works on the Blackberry, the smartphone popular among professionals.

The deal is an extension of Rearden Commerce’s existing partnership with American Express. Since 2006, AmEx has offered Rearden Commerce’s concierge service to its AmEx business travel network — a deal that includes about 1,500 business customers of American Express. Almost half a million people at these companies used Rearden Commerce’s web service to do things like manage their travel.

As of today, these travel customers will also be able to use the mobile version of the service. In addition, American Express’ 300 customers among the Fortune 500 companies will also be able to use the service.

Rearden Commerce launched its “mobile personal assistant” version in May, when it started offering the service to other companies directly. It says more than 5,000 employees, including for example some at Thomson Reuters, have downloaded the service to their phone already.

The mobile service synchronizes with Rearden Commerce’s main Web-oriented personal assistant service. So you can obtain your travel itinerary with a single click on your Rearden Commerce mobile phone application. The mobile service offers alerts, ways to rebook travel plans, weather forecasts in the locations your traveling to and click-to-call car service. Soon, said Dan Ford, VP of Product Marketing, the company will introduce new features, letting you send details about your travel plans to your friends in an email, with an easy way to include the weather plans along with it. You’ll also be able to find restaurants near to you, and make reservations.

American Express is an investor in the company, as is Chase. Chase announced last month it was going to offer Rearden Commerce’s personal assistant to some of its consumer card holders.

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Rearden Commerce, the Silicon Valley company that offers a digital concierge service online, has launched its mobile version.

I first talked about the Rearden’s mobile service, called a “Mobile Personal Assistant” earlier this month. It offers ways to keep travel itineraries, track weather, manage your calendar and more. It gives you status updates and alerts around these items, and features a carousel that lets you reel through the items easily (see arrow in image, which points to the carousel on left hand side).

It’s not clear how popular the Foster City, Calif. company’s service will be. At the outset, it’s aiming for the high-end professional, with a Blackberry version.

It’s also not the most open service, showing you only Zagat restaurant reviews, for example, but not Yelp — though the company says it may change that in the future.

One thing is for sure; the company is serious. It has raised $100M from investors to push this service.

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Rearden Commerce, a Silicon Valley company that wants to become your personal concierge everywhere, including on your mobile phone, has raised $100 million in funding from some financial powerhouses.

So far, the company has worked for years on a web-based personal assistant service, which lets you do everything from book travel arrangements to manage your calendar. But the company recently demoed its coming mobile service to VentureBeat. It is preparing for a major offensive in mobile, to be announced at the end of this month.

Investors include JPMorgan Chase, American Express, Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Capital. The latter three has also pumped in an earlier $100 million round. The company is now valued at more than $500 million, according to an anonymous source cited in a separate Dow Jones article (no link).

It comes at a time when there’s a big race on among companies to be able to offer advertisers a compelling mobile platform to reach consumers. Rearden says it can offer advertisers detailed information, about where people are located at any given time, what their travel plans are and all sorts of other information about them.

It is growing quickly. It has 300 employees, and wants to have 500 by the end of this year.

The Foster City, Calif.-based Rearden Commerce was created by Patrick Grady, who has worked on this since 1999, and who was previously an investor.

Notably, it also comes at a time when fast-growing social networks like Facebook are developing more robust mobile versions, which also contain useful applications that might compete with Rearden. However, Rearden says its product is more robust for transactions.

Indeed, the company’s user-friendly personal assistant helps you manage a variety of tasks, including dining, managing your address book and more. But it has focused on business-to-business applications, making sure transactions can be conducted securely. But the company will eventually deliver the Rearden Personal Assistant for consumers. The company also plans to rapidly scale its on-demand platform, to allow new merchants and third-party applications providers to be integrated into its concierge service. A demo of the company’s initial technology is here.

The downside, however, is that its platform isn’t completely open. If you prefer Yelp as a restaurant review service, for example, you can’t sub it instead of Rearden’s default service, Zagat. While the service will open up more going forward, executives aren’t saying when that will happen.

The mobile version isn’t yet public, but the demo we saw shows that the mobile features use some of the cooler features of Yahoo Go, such as the ability to scroll through your services, carousel-like, via a menu on the left-hand side of your phone.

Rearden Commerce has also inked strategic partnerships with American Express and JPMorgan Chase. In the past 18 months, Rearden Commerce has added more than 1,700 new corporate customers representing more than one million contracted users. The customers include Fortune 500 companies such as ConAgra Foods and Thomson as well as small enterprises C-COR, Diagnostic Health, and Symplified Technologies.

It’s worth noting that the company raised the big pile of cash during a weak environment for start-ups to raise venture capital.

The company came out secrecy in 2005. Its Rearden Personal Assistant helps users find and book the range of services they need based on company policies, their personal preferences, location and the context of what they’re doing.

Just like a seasoned executive assistant, the Rearden Personal Assistant automatically inserts details into the user’s calendar and proactively notifies them of schedule changes via phone, email or text message — whether they’re in the office or on the road. Chase said it plans to use the assistants as the basis for a program to manage a new credit-card service for millions of consumers.

The company is not yet profitable but says it has growing revenue streams from some 137,000 merchants that are hoping to gain distribution through the assistant.

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