Travel Triangle, India’s fastest growing travel marketplace recently raised Rs 78 crore Series C funding from Fundamentum, a growth-capital fund for mid-stage tech startups in India financed by Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal. This funding round also saw the participation of several existing investors such as SAIF Partners, Bessermer Venture Partners, RB investments and a handful of angel investors. This marks the first Fundamentum investment and the capital fund will join the board of TravelTriangle.
The funds raised will serve to enhance the TravelTriangle’s technology as the firm looks into improving their customer interaction segment with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Data analytics will serve to set up a recommendation engine.
The company is also looking forward to add newer destinations to their website and invest on advertising.
Sanjeev Aggarwal and Nandan Nillekani have a proven track record for investing in successful travel startups such as MakeMyTrip, RedBus and RailYatri.
“We met more than 50 companies before investing in TravelTriangle and we were very impressed by the team. We believe that this team is amongst the very best that we have seen in the Indian technology eco-system, by virtue of their learnability, customer-centricity, frugality, and hunger to build a very large business. They have the foresight and demonstrated operational experience to win this category. We are very excited about partnering with the team to build this business together,” said Nandan Nilekani.
“Holidays is a very large and profitable market, and requires a team with product-first DNA who can take along multiple ecosystem players. Sankalp and the team have the right combination of technology expertise, business acumen and domain knowledge to win the holiday travel market. We are delighted to collaborate with TravelTriangle and look forward to the exciting next phase of growth,” said Ashish Kumar, partner, Fundamentum.
TravelTriangle was founded in 2011 and is among the very few travel startup to generate profits while still growing the company. It is presently India’s market leader in the online holiday travel sector and are credited for bringing order to the otherwise disorganized travel agent industry in India.
“We are continually growing and have been the fastest growing holiday player with the highest NPS (Net Promoter Score). To win the confidence of pedigreed entrepreneur investors like Nandan and Sanjeev is a great validation of our journey thus far. Our success up till now has been the effort of our super motivated and diligent team,” said Sankalp Agarwal, co-founder and CEO, TravelTriangle.
Market research in the Travel Marketplace segment indicates that the Indian holiday market stands at a colossal $10 billion presently and is forecasted to be worth $30 billion in the coming 5-6 years. Backpackers wishing travel overseas, couples wishing to spend their honeymoons on a romantic island or families willing to travel together reportedly drive this sudden growth. TravelTriangle logically target this type of customers in order to grow their company and gain market shares.
Consequently, this sector involves a sales process that is centered around counseling and requires adequate technology providing several activities, tickets and supplies compiled in one comprehensible package.
Additionally, TravelTriangle offers a Software as a Service (SaaS) supported by a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform for travel agents to manage and identify customer relationships to certain packages and activities to draw insights from there to identify how they can retain customers and drive sales growth.