The Best-Funded Travel Startups Through the End of 2019

In 2019, 10 travel startups — named below — brought their total funding to $500 million or more. Compare that with a decade ago: No travel startup seeking funds in 2009 had raised that much money.

Most of today’s best-funded startups aren’t profitable. So it’s likely that more travel industry people now work for money-losing companies than have at any point since the dot-com bubble burst around 2001.

What changed in fundraising over the decade? Record low inflation made it cheaper for investors to borrow funds, while bull markets drove up the prices of traditional assets and made alternative opportunities more appealing.

Another factor was that many investors came to believe that the best-funded startups will win by simply outspending their rivals and achieving a dominant market position.

Yet betting on any of these so-called unicorns — or companies with a value of at least $1 billion — isn’t for the faint of heart.

Exhibit A: Deem, a corporate travel startup, had raised as much as $536 million over a couple of decades. In 2019, car rental company Enterprise bought Deem. The private companies didn’t disclose the purchase price. Yet we feel sure the price didn’t fetch a spectacular return for investors. A hint came in a comparison of press statements before and after that suggested that privately held Enterprise paid only about $600 million.

Deem is just one example of a couple of broader truths. Fundraising is a separate skill from creating an enduringly profitable business. In other words, past fundraising performance is no guarantee of future results.

Here’s a look, below, at the 10 travel startups that have raised the most money over their lifetimes as of December 31, 2019, based on publicly available information.

Some notes on our list: Many large startups are shy about revealing investment details. So some of these funding totals are approximate.

We excluded companies that focus on providing local and commuting services, rather than long-distance and intercity services. We left out all ridesharing services like Uber and carpooling services like BlaBlaCar. We kept off our list private equity rounds in hotel management companies, airlines, and cruise lines, and space tourism, as well as corporate rounds in subsidiary companies and all post-IPO rounds.

We also left out some niche categories of companies, such as the so-called “mobility” companies that offer private jets, flying taxis, and hyperloops.

We called out the names of a handful of “headline investors” based on their newsworthiness in our eyes. But the founders of these startups love all of their backers and aren’t responsible for the names we listed or left off.

Check out Skift’s Top Travel Startups to Watch in 2019, here.