The UK-based travel startup Duffel has made a major funding announcement of securing €19.2 million in its Series A funding round. It is also set to soon unveil its online travel booking platform that it has been all mysterious about till now. The company says it is working on reinventing global travel booking systems for mobile and web travel companies but has refrained from revealing what it has been working on.
The latest round of Series A funding for Duffel was led by Benchmark, which is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. Benchmark has also backed some other well-known startups like Google, Uber, WeWork, Snap and Instagram. Alongside Benchmark, this funding round was joined by Blossom Capital, which led Duffel’s seed investment with participation from Index Ventures. This is the third funding round for the startup, after its two initial seed rounds.
Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO of Duffel, says, “The travel industry is underpinned by archaic software and processes that are fundamentally prohibitive for the modern day traveller. We are reinventing the underwiring between online agents and the providers – airlines, hotels, transport operators – in much the same way that the payments world is changing for merchants, because of tools like Adyen and Stripe.”
Not revealing what it’s working on, Duffel says it is ‘mastering’ mastering layers of technical complexity and managing multiple stakeholders. Its upcoming platform is touted to enable the company’s mission of making the booking experience simpler, faster and cheaper. The company’s co-founders Steve Domin and Tom Bates reveal that they have an engineering team comprising of alumni from GoCardless, Gitlab and Turo. The startup is aiming for a public launch of its platform this Autumn and will use the fresh funds for hiring more engineers and growing its London team.
Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark, says, “We have been watching Duffel from a distance and we are incredibly excited by the possibility it has to create something valuable for customers and travel providers alike. Duffel is focused on providing a better booking experience by building a platform that is easy to use with deep functionality.”
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