TravelTriangle, one of India’s leading holiday travel market place, has announced that it has raised INR 78 cr (US$12M,) Series C funding led by Fundamentum, the growth-capital fund for mid-stage technology companies in India backed by Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal. Existing investors- SAIF Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, RB investments and a clutch of angel investors also participated. This is the first investment by Fundamentum and Ashish Kumar, Partner, Fundamentum will join the TravelTriangle board.
Founded in 2011 by Sankalp Agarwal, Sanchit Garg and Prabhat Gupta, TravelTriangle is a rare travel startup that has already hit positive unit economics and scale. It is the market leader in online holiday travel in India and has helped organise the fragmented travel agent industry as far as holiday travel is concerned. It currently gets a monthly traffic of 2.5 million and has close to 700 active travel agents operating through the platform. Today there are travel agents who get close to 90 per cent of their revenue, through TravelTriangle. The funds will be used to invest in building technology that further strengthens the customer interaction layer using artificial intelligence and machine learning, while the data analytics will help build a recommendation engine. The company will also expand to newer destinations and invest in brand building.
Announcing the investment in TravelTriangle, Nandan Nilekani said, “We met more than 50 companies before investing in TravelTriangle and we were very impressed by the team. We believe that this team is amongst the very best that we have seen in the Indian technology eco-system, by virtue of their learnability, customer-centricity, frugality, and hunger to build a very large business. They have the foresight and demonstrated operational experience to win this category. We are very excited about partnering with the team to build this business together.”
According to experts, the Indian holiday market is a US$10Bn opportunity, and is stated to become US$30Bn in the next five to six years. This growth is largely driven by independent travellers wanting to travel overseas/domestic as a couple, family or individuals and this is the segment that TravelTriangle has focused on, to rapidly scale and attain market leadership. This segment requires a far more consultative sales process and building technology that integrates multiple activities, tickets and supplies in the form of one itinerary. Towards that end TravelTriangle offers a SaaS-based CRM platform for travel agents to manage and analyse customer interactions and draw insights from there to improve customer retention and drive sales growth.
Sankalp Agarwal, Co-Founder & CEO, TravelTriangle said, “The vision of the company is to encompass all the components of online holiday eco-system and be the one-stop solution for the traveller. We are continually growing and have been the fastest growing holiday player with the highest NPS (Net Promoter Score). To win the confidence of pedigreed entrepreneur investors like Nandan and Sanjeev is a great validation of our journey thus far. Our success up till now has been the effort of our super motivated and diligent team.”
Fundamentum views vertical commerce in India as a great opportunity. The fund believes that a very large company in the holiday planning space is eminently possible, given the inability of large horizontal players to grow in this market. Ashish Kumar, Partner, Fundamentum said, “Holidays is a very large and profitable market, and requires a team with product-first DNA who can take along multiple ecosystem players. Sankalp and the team have the right combination of technology expertise, business acumen and domain knowledge to win the holiday travel market. We are delighted to collaborate with TravelTriangle and look forward to the exciting next phase of growth.”
