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Delhi-based online global travel community for travellers, Tripoto, has raised another round of funding led by 500 Startups, IDG Ventures & Advantedge fund. Besides, prominent angels like T.V Mohandas Pai, Singapore Angel Network, Neeraj Arora (VP of WhatsApp) and Leon Seynave (Chairman at Stanhope Capital LLP) also participated in this round.
Started in 2013 by Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdoh, Tripoto aims at strengthening its leadership in technology, content and community with addition of video content, automated content creation tools, social publishing features and personalization.
In over a time span of two years, since inception, Tripoto has established itself as the youngest and fastest growing startups in the travel vertical in India.
Tripoto claims to have largest curated source of user-generated travel itineraries with around 250,000 itineraries, created through its web and mobile publishing platforms.
According to Tripoto, users publish more than 20,000 trips on the platform every month. It also has more than 1 Mn social interactions every month that include users messaging each other, adding trips to their wishlist and following inspiring travellers in the community.
Since the company’s last fund raise in March, its app downloads soared to 250,000, and the cumulative monthly users across platforms increased more than three times, reaching to 2 Mn.
Speaking on the development, Michael Lyngdoh, founder of Tripoto said, “What we have cracked so far is incredible. We are one of the very rare platforms in India that have managed to create a community and user generated content at such scale and quality. Users are publishing their travel stories, itineraries and experiences in large numbers on our platform. Our content is highly structured with mapped data, timestamps and GPS location which allows innumerable applications of our data. We also have managed to collect one of the largest dataset in India about travel preferences of our users in the form of travel interests, travel wishlists, search histories and browsing patterns.”
Tripoto seeks to be the one-stop app for travellers to discover, plan and in the near future, carry out transactions around the community model.
Anirudh Gupta, founder and CEO of Tripoto said that the company is now working towards personalisation of user experiences through the collected data. Anirudh added, “Personalised news-feeds, native ads, the deep integration of hotels and homestays into the content are the next steps for us. It is important that hotels and homestays are relevant to the content and the context of the traveler and we are in a very strong position to solve that.”
The company plans to continue to raise more capital to grow at a faster pace, and become the dominant travel 2.0 player in India and further look beyond India at a later stage.
Tripoto competes with other travel startups like Triphobo that raised $3 Mn Series B funding in March this year. Smartairtrip.com which had raised $10 Mn in first round of funding for 10% equity, and Travel Triangle that raised $8 Mn in April this year.
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