ClearTrip Raises Fresh Round Of Funding; Launches ‘Local’ Category

Online travel portal, ClearTrip, has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Concur Technologies and Gund Investment. Other existing investors also participated in this round. According to president and chief operating officer, Samyukth Sridharan, the company has raised $75 Mn so far. It also raised an internal round in February – March this year led by a few of the existing investors.

Earlier in April 2015, the company announced that it was in talks to raise $30 Mn Series E round.

In order to compete with the heavily funded travel portals like MakeMyTrip and GoIbibo, Cleartrip has also launched a segment called ‘Local‘ on its app. With four sub-categories- events, fitness, food and adventure, it will help consumers to book places in the city ranging from food joints to yoga classes and adventure sports like Dirt Biking. Activities as a separate segment was launched in the middle of 2015, it is only now that the company has divided it into four categories.

It is difficult for the company to scale transactions because of the large ticket size in the travel segment. Local, which have an average ticket size of INR 300-350 as compared to INR 8000-9000 per person in travel segment, will help the company scale up faster.

“People spend close to 40 weekends at home and it is a big market,” said Sridharan. “Activity is probably about half the size of the travel market itself in terms of consumers but it is extremely fragmented. Travel business in India is roughly $6-7 Bn,” he added.

Cleartrip is targeting transactions from this segment to make up 50% of its total revenue in the next three years.

In January this year, MakeMyTrip raised $180 Mn from Ctrip.com International Ltd, followed  up by Naspers Group’s $250 Mn in Ibibo Group, which owns and operates Goibibo in February.

The news was first reported by LiveMint.