Online community for travellers Tripoto raises Series A funding from 500 Startups, Neeraj Arora and others
The online community for travellers, Tripoto, has raised Series A round from 500 Startups, IDG Ventures, and Advantedge Fund. Prominent angels - Neeraj Arora (VP, Whatsapp) and Leon Seynave also participated in the round.
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The company will use funds for strengthening technology, content, and community with the addition of video content, automated content creation tools, social publishing features, and personalization.
Founded by Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdoh, Tripoto brings together travellers from around the world to share and discover real, and actionable crowdsourced travel stories. The startup maps every single destination in the story, along with the associated content and pictures.
The company had secured pre Series A round in March this year and claims to have 250,000 app downloads and two million users.
"We are now working towards the extreme personalization of the user experiences on Tripoto through our own collected big data in travel. Personalized news-feeds, native ads and the deep integration of hotels and homestays into the content are the next steps for us. It is important that hotels and homestays that are relevant to the content and the context of the traveler and we are in a very strong position to solve that," says Anirudh Gupta, Founder and CEO, Tripoto.
The Delhi-based startup had snapped up $400K seed round from angel investors led by Outbox Ventures, including Snapdeal’s Founders Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal, and Sachin Bhatia of Trulymadly in November last year.
The startup claims to have the largest curated source of user-generated travel itineraries in the world with around 250,000 itineraries created through its web and mobile publishing platforms. Every month, users publish more than 20,000 trips on the platform and has more than one million social interactions every month that include users messaging each other.
Besides discovery and community, the company also plans to carry out transactions around the community model. It also plans to raise more capital to grow at an even faster pace and become the dominant travel 2.0 player in India and further look beyond India at a later stage.
YourStory’s take
With Series A, Tripoto will be in a better position to establish a leadership position in overall travel community space. The company has a unique model and we don't see any close competitors of Tripoto. However, it competes broadly with Triphobo, which also focuses on itineraries.
Tripoto also plans to enter customize packages and carry out transactions around the community model. With the integration of aforementioned features, it will also compete with Traveltriangle and Holidify among others.
Currently, the company has a strong focus on India but it also harbours dreams of global expansion and going forward it may expand to Southeast Asia and neighbouring countries.