Ruba is a visual travel guide & tour review site that helps travelers from around the world discover their next trip. Visitors can browse highly visual guides written by other travelers about interesting themes such as “The Top 7 Most Picturesque Towns in Provence France.”

The company embraces the highly social nature of travel planning via tight integration with Facebook and Twitter and integrates Google maps for geographic locations and addresses. Ruba was founded by serial entrepreneurs Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber and is backed by leading venture capital firms Benchmark and DFJ. Advisory Board members with backgrounds as senior executives from Google, Yelp, Yahoo, and other leading companies are helping guide Ruba’s introduction and growth.

The website makes it fun and easy to browse and discover amazing new places around the world that best match a user’s travel tastes. Unlike other travel review sites where users consume reviews of individual hotels, restaurants, or sights, on Ruba users explore full guides which are collections of reviews of the best places (e.g., My Favorite Historical Places in Italy). Ruba’s highly engaging visual interface with thousands of high quality pictures empowers users to enjoy travel exploration and research even if they have no immediate plans for a trip.