[Funding alert] Airfare marketplace Mystifly raises $3.3M in pre-Series B round led by Recruit

Singapore and Bengaluru-based air retailing and payments platform Mystifly on Monday announced that it had raised $3.3 million in a pre-Series B round of funding from existing investor Recruit Co., Ltd.

The company last raised Series A in 2016 led by Recruit and has since then been focusing on profitable growth. The firm claimed that it reported profits in the 11 months of its operations in 2019-20 until COVID-19 impacted the aviation industry in March 2020. 

Mystifly’s leadership team comprises Founder and CEO Rajeev Kumar, CFO Pawan Kesarwani, and CTO Bharat Goyal. 

“The new fund raise is significant with the global aviation industry going through its toughest times. The investment will help Mystifly to continue to strengthen its product and technology, data science and machine learning capabilities, and address airline payments inefficiency while weathering the COVID-19 storm,” said the leadership team at Mystifly. 

ALSO READ

[Funding alert] B2B payments startup PayMate raises Series D from Japan’s Recruit, Visa, and others

Mystifly offers a full-stack API platform to transform and maximise online travel business capability for existing travel businesses and for new-age eCommerce and travel intermediaries.

The offering includes flights search, retailing booking and fulfillment, and payments API platform along with airline connectivity and tools to service any travel/ecommerce intermediary, who wishes to either start an air travel business or expand their air business globally.

The company said it launched a fully automated and guaranteed cancellations and changes product C2 in November 2019 and its new-age airline retailing platform ASR1.0 in February 2020.

Mystifly was founded in 2009 in Bengaluru and is now headquartered in Singapore with a total team of 140 people. The company’s global customers include the best known OTA brands, global loyalty programmes, travel management companies, and meta search engines.

The distribution, fulfilment, and payments technology platform offers air fare deals from all full-service airlines through existing distribution platform partnerships, direct connectivity and new distribution capability (NDC), and low-cost airlines shopping across the globe - all through a single platform. 

Rajeev added that “The era of airline retailing and efficient payments has begun and the current crisis has made this transition faster than anticipated . Airlines will significantly improve their bottom line by saving on payment costs and becoming new-age retailers as they can make more relevant offers, including services with higher margins than just the flight seat price. There is no doubt that retail airlines will be the talk of the town in the coming months, just as how low-cost carriers were about 10-15 years back.”

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)