GoEuro Raises $150 Million for Transportation Search: Travel Startup Funding This Week

This week the total funding publicized was more than $175 million.

>>GoEuro, an online travel agency that offers plane, bus, and rail tickets side-by-side, raised $150 million. The database service Crunchbase describes the latest round as a Series D, but GoEuro hasn’t labeled its recent fundings.

Kinnevik, a publicly held technology investment firm based in Sweden, and Temasek, Singapore’s state-run investment company, led the round. The Berlin-based startup had previously raised $145 million. Past investors include Battery, Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Silver Lake.

The five-year-old company plans to use the fresh capital to add more transport choices for consumers and contemplate mergers and acquisitions. It recently acquired European transport aggregator BusRadar, based in Germany.

Since its last funding in October 2016, GoEuro has boosted the number of consumers who use it each month from 10 million to 27 million. More than 650 transport partners offer direct sales through its site and app, with approximately another 150 suppliers offering tickets via resellers.

GoEuro has grown in revenue about 120 percent, year-over-year, it said. It provides a full product in 15 European countries, up from a dozen in October 2016, and it plans to expand beyond Europe.

GoEuro’s largest online rivals, whose services overlap but also differ, include BlaBlaCar, KelBillet/Gopili, Kiwi.com, and Rome2Rio. Skift profiled GoEuro in August.

>>Domio, a technology hospitality company that runs an apartment-hotel brand, said it has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round.

Tribeca Venture Partners led the round. SoftBank Capital NY and Loric Ventures also participated. In January, the company said it had raised $5 million in equity and convertible debt financing.

The funding comes several weeks after Domio announced a $50 million joint venture with private equity firm Upper 90 to exclusively fund the leasing and operating of as many as 25 apartment-style hotels for group travelers. Its first branded apart-hotel property — Domio Baronne St. — is slated to open in New Orleans on December 1.

Domio, a New York City company founded in 2016, has hosted more than 80,000 guests to date across its existing properties in eight markets including Austin, Nashville, and Honolulu. It plans to triple its footprint during the next year. Unlike home-sharing brands, Domio runs each of the units it rents.

The average booking on Domio is for five guests, and the median size of its units is 1,500 square feet, which is five times the average hotel size in the U.S., the company said. In August, Domio named Richard Lieb, the former head of Goldman Sachs’ Real Estate Investment Banking Group, to its advisory board.

>>Fleet on Demand, which provides mobility management technology to enterprises with software that unifies fleet and travel program data, has raised $6.4 million, or £5 million, in investment.

Investment firm BGF (Business Growth Fund) took a minority stake in the company by providing the capital. The companies didn’t disclose if it was a Series A round. Until now, Fleet on Demand, founded in 2012, had been bootstrapped. The money will be used to expand the Saltaire, United Kingdom-based company’s sales to Europe and beyond.

In September, Fleet on Demand debuted Mobilleo, an enterprise mobile app that aggregates thousands of public and private transportation providers to allow travel management companies to find, book, and pay for their entire business journey — including company vehicles, parking, car rental, flights, trains, accommodation, restaurants, airport lounges, car clubs, buses, and taxis — through one transaction, on one device, and with centralized back-office reporting.

The tool lets a corporate travel manager compare the pricing for available modes of travel for a full door-to-door itinerary, the company said.

>>Perfect Price, a startup based in Oakland, California, has raised $5.8 million in seed financing, primarily from angel investors.

The company uses artificial intelligence to make pricing decisions. It claims to automate the process of analyzing multiple streams of data to adjust prices dynamically to reflect an ideal rate for a marketplace or customer segment at any given moment.

The startup, founded in 2014, is a graduate of Alchemist Accelerator and has 12 employees. It would like to work for all categories of enterprises. Yet today all of its clients are in travel. It says it will announce a partnership with a publicly-traded travel company within a few months.

>>Smartvel, a startup providing tools for managing destination content, has received $1 million in seed funding.

Caixa Capital Risc, Alsa, Fides Capital, and Faraday participated.

Customers like Singapore Airlines and the destination marketers for Buenos Aires have used the Madrid-based company’s tools to help manage their campaigns and provide destination guides to consumers.

Skift Cheat Sheet:
We define a startup as a company formed to test and build a repeatable and scalable business model. Few companies meet that definition. The rare ones that do often attract venture capital. Their funding rounds come in waves.

Seed capital is money used to start a business, often led by angel investors and friends or family.

Series A financing is typically drawn from venture capitalists. The round aims to help a startup’s founders make sure that their product is something that customers truly want to buy.

Series B financing is mainly about venture capitalist firms helping a company grow faster, or scale up. These fundraising rounds can assist with recruiting skilled workers and developing cost-effective marketing.

Series C financing is ordinarily about helping a company expand, such as through acquisitions. In addition to VCs, hedge funds, investment banks, and private equity firms often participate.

Series D, E and beyond These mainly mature businesses and the funding round may help a company prepare to go public or be acquired. A variety of types of private investors might participate.

Check out our previous startup funding roundups, here. And also: Skift’s Top Travel Startups to Watch 2018.