Duffel Joins Wave of Startups Accelerating Efforts to Reinvent Airline Distribution

A little-known software company that helps airlines sell their tickets has quietly amassed more venture capital funding than all other next-generation airline distribution startups that aim to route around traditional travel distribution go-betweens. Duffel said Monday it had raised $30 million in a Series B round of investment. That brought the London-based startup's funding total to $56 million The size of Duffel's funding haul is less notable than that Index Ventures led the Series B. Index has seen several of his portfolio companies list on public markets in the past couple of years, such as digital-payments processor Adyen and digital storage provider Dropbox. Duffel's Series B is also notable for coming merely a few months after Benchmark Capital, which famously invested early in Uber in 2011, participated in a Series A round. Duffel, founded in 2017, graduated last year from the Y Combinator startup accelerator, which has produced many startups, including Airbnb, Hipmunk, and Airhelp. Duffel also catches notice for having signed up several airlines, including major ones like American Airlines, British Airways, Iberia, and Lufthansa, and mid-size and budget carriers like Aegean Airlines and Vueling. A Wave of Upstart Players For years, American, Lufthansa, and other airlines have innovated in how they sell their fares on their sites and mobile apps. But they've struggled to build the digital pipes, so to speak, to let agencies and other e-commerce companies sell tickets in similar ways. They've been looking