The Top 31 Most Heavily Venture-Funded Startups In Travel

Yesterday, travel startups HotelTonight and GetYourGuide announced major funding rounds, and both of the travel startups are now well into double-digit millions on the amounts they’ve raised so far — HotelTonight may soon even touch $100 million mark.

That gave us an idea to compile a list of all the biggest venture-funded startups currently in travel and we came up with this list of 31 companies, with the lowest cutoff of around $20 million.

Some observations:

• Airbnb and Uber, never really billed as travel startups per se, are the two biggest venture-backed startups that exist now across tech, not just the travel tech sector.
• Chinese car rental, sharing, and booking companies have raised huge amounts to compete on scale.
• Russian booking companies have raised large amounts to compete in an especially competitive market.
• In general, room sharing and car sharing requires lot of investment to build, disrupt, and compete.
• Only four B2B startups are on this list. Surprisingly, two are aimed at the intersection of travel transactions and advertising/retargeting.
• Hotel booking is where the big action is on the traditional online booking transactions side.
• On the investors side, some of the active funds on the larger sized rounds include Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Accel Partners, and Goldman Sachs.
• In the earlier stages, Crunchfund surprisingly is the most active in this list, with Ron Conway’s SV Angel investing alongside for most part. First Round Capital pops up on that list as well.
• Concur is the only active strategic investor in travel’s biggest startups.
• Almost all of the big startups in travel were started in the last five years.