Holiday Triangle Travel Pvt. Ltd, which operates TravelTriangle.com, on Tuesday said it has raised Rs78 crore ($12 million) in a series C round of funding led by Fundamentum, the mid-stage venture capital (VC) fund founded by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Helion Ventures founder Sanjeev Aggarwal.
Existing investors including SAIF Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, RB investments and a clutch of angel investors also participated in the current round. Till date, the company has raised $20 million across three rounds.
The fresh funds will be used to upgrade technological capabilities around artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. The company will also expand to newer travel destinations and invest in brand building.
Founded in 2011 by Sankalp Agarwal, Prabhat Gupta, and Sanchit Garg, TravelTriangle connects users with travel agents online, fetches price quotations, customize holiday trips, and make bookings online.
TravelTriangle also offers a cloud-based Customer Relations Management (CRM) software platform for travel agents to manage and analyse customer interaction, and to draw insights to improve customer retention.
It currently claims to service around 60,000 customers every year and has close to 700 active travel agents operating through the platform. The company said that travel agents using their platform get close to 90% of their revenue, through TravelTriangle.
For Fundamentum, TavelTriangle is their first investment after the VC fund raised $20 million from Canadian pension fund Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec (CDPQ) last month. The fund plans to raise a total of $100 million and will primarily invest in technology and software start-ups.
In the past, Fundamentum’s founder Aggarwal and Nilekani have invested in online travel aggregator (OTA) MakeMyTrip, and in online ticketing firms RedBus and RailYatri.
“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…We are very excited about partnering with the team to build this business together,” Nilekani said in a statement.
According to TravelTriangle’s chief executive Sankalp Agarwal, the company’s idea is to encompass all the components of online holiday eco-system and be the one-stop solution for travelers.
“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,” added Agarwal.
Source: Mint