Skift Take
It has been a big week for small players, as investors placed bets on startups in these sectors: tours-and-activities, ground transportation, Brazilian flight booking, and digital marketing.
Each week we round up travel startups that have recently received or announced funding. The total raised this week was more than $3 million.
>>Rezdy, a company that offers software tools for tours-and-activities providers, has raised $1.8 million in funding, in a round led by Bailador Technology Investments, with Microequities VC Fund also participating.
Founded in 2011 in Sydney, Rezdy has raised $4 million in prior rounds. It will use the fresh capital to open an office in Las Vegas.
Besides reservations software, Rezdy offers a marketplace that aggregates tours and activities for resellers, such as travel agents, concierge desks, online travel agencies, and reservation engines.
Its software simplifies back-end operations for customers with its inventory, scheduling, and reservation engines. Rezdy also provides basic marketing tools and it helps to distribute tour products via integrated agents, such as Viator, Redballoon, Ctrip, and City Discovery, and through 1,000 travel agents and hotel concierges.
>>Travel Appeal is a Florence-based software company with an artificial intelligence engine that analyzes the digital behavior of customers to help tourism operators make informed decisions. It has raised 720,000 euros (or about $772,000), from three undisclosed investors. The startup had raised $377,840 in a pre-seed round that included capital from the H-FARM innovation hub.
Founded in 2014, Travel Appeal provides software for small hotels, bed and breakfasts, camping sites, restaurants, and museums). It recently built a “virtual assistant” that allows customers to ask natural language questions.
It plans to use new investment to bring its services to other European countries and to the United States. The 20-employee company also aims to more broadly use machine learning to analyze more signals that arise from digital tools.
>>Voopter, which says it is is Brazil’s most popular flight metasearch engine, has received a Series B investment from Travel Capitalist Ventures, a travel-focused investment firm in Doha, Qatar. Also participating in the round is No Borders Investments Limited (Doha).
The $600,000 investment adds to the round of 350,000 euro (about $370,000 in today’s dollars) from Global Founders Capital, a German venture capital company, which has also joined this latest round.
Created in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, Voopter is moving its headquarters to São Paulo around April. In January alone it produced leads for 90,000 transactions either at the airlines’ websites or via online travel agencies.
>>Betterez is a Toronto-based company that has created reservation and ticket management software for ground transportation providers and attractions, events, and conferences. It has received a seed round of funding from Amadeus Ventures, an investment arm of the travel technology giant. The funding amount was not disclosed.
Donald Carty, a former CEO of American Airlines, also participated in this round and will join the Betterez board of directors. Dave Wright, ServiceNow’s chief strategy officer, will join its advisory board.
Founded in 2011, Betterez creates tools for reservations and ticketing. It also provides mobile and web apps, plus API-based white-label services for operators to place their booking tools within third-party websites. Last year it doubled the size of its customer list, mostly among bus and coach operators.
Check out our previous startup funding roundups, here.
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Tags: funding, rezdy, startups, vcroundup
Photo credit: Rezdy, an activity booking software company in Australia, recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. Rezdy