Holiday Triangle Travel Pvt. Ltd, which operates TravelTriangle.com, on Monday said it has raised $10 million in a series B round of funding led by RB Investments, a Singapore-based venture capital firm. Existing investors SAIF Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round.
Previously, the Noida-based company had raised a $1.7 million pre-series A funding in July 2014, followed by a series A round of $8 million in April 2015.
TravelTriangle will invest the funds in technology and product development, as it aims to turn a profit in the next 18 months.
Founded in 2011 by Sankalp Agarwal, Prabhat Gupta, and Sanchit Garg, TravelTriangle connects customers to travel agents, fetches quotations, customizes trips and makes bookings online.
With a team of over 400 people, TravelTriangle operates from offices in Noida, Gurgaon, Mumbai and the US. The company currently has a network of over 650 travel agents, which it expects to increase to over 1,500 agents in the next 18 months, said Agarwal.
“Two years ago (2014) only 13 million people in India travelled (to international destinations) which grew to 17-18 million in 2016. This is a vast jump… with 65 million passport holders in India, this trend will continue to reach about 50 million (outbound travelers) by 2021,” he said in a telephone interview.
With most of the domestic tour packages costing between Rs30,000 and Rs1.8 lakh per couple, Agarwal added that by connecting travellers to travel agents along with customizing tours the travellers are able to negotiate better and save 5-10% compared to other travel booking options.
On the other hand, TravelTriangle provides software solutions to travel agents to sell, analyse, track and manage the holidays sold. Leveraging data, the company plans to introduce more product features for both travellers and agents, said Agarwal.
Declining to comment on how many bookings the company facilitates, Agarwal shared that it receives traffic of two million across its website and blog. TravelTriangle serves more than 100 domestic destinations and 40 destinations worldwide, serving travellers from more than 65 countries. The company plans to serve over 100 overseas destinations in next 18 months.
While Agarwal claims that in leisure segment TravelTriangle is growing faster than online travel agents (OTAs), these OTAs have led consolidation in India’s online travel industry over the past 12 months.
After announcing its merger with Ibibo Group in October 2016, MakeMyTrip received the go-ahead from Competition Commission of India in January 2017, creating the country’s largest online travel firm, worth $1.8 billion.
Prior to that, Yatra Online Inc. announced it would reverse-merge with Nasdaq-listed Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp. in July 2016. This transaction assigned an enterprise value of $218 million to the Indian online travel agency and resulted it trading on the US-based stock exchange as YTRA.
Source: Mint