Travel app Trip38 raises $1M in seed round from IndiGo owner & Lantern Capital

Bangalore-based Trip38 Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns and operates travel management app Trip38, has secured $1 million (Rs 6.2 crore) in a seed round of funding from InterGlobe Technology Quotient, a part of the promoter group of IndiGo, and Singapore's Lantern Capital, a top company executive told Techcircle.in.

The money will be used for marketing, customer acquisition and enhancing technology.

Founded in 2014 by Niranjan Gupta, Seshadri Krishnan and Markish R, the startup offers travel assistant such as check in alerts. It is a location aware mobile app that provides context sensitive content in terms of flight e-tickets, flight status, airport information, sightseeing options, restaurants, local events, weather, hotel offers, deals, embassy information etc.

Gupta has over 25 years of experience in the travel industry. Before founding Trip38, he had co-founded online travel agency via.com and hotel aggregator MagicRooms. MagicRooms was acquired by Yatra in 2011. He has a MBA degree from Case Western Reserve University - Weatherhead School of Management.

Markish was earlier CTO with MagicRooms.

Krishnan, a BITS Pilani grad, started his career at Wipro and later worked at Sapient. Previously he had started another travel tech startup iVinca, a trip planning and experience provider.

Trip38 offers information of over 350,000 hotels and 180,000 sightseeing options across the world. It also provides information about check-in, baggage allowance for more than 100 leading airlines across the world.

Its current revenue stream includes platform usage fee or transaction fee from hotels and tourism boards.

According to the company, India accounts for 40 to 50 per cent of the total app usage of the firm.

It says it has over 25,000 downloads across 170 countries so far. It aims to have 3 million downloads in 12 to 18 months.

The company is working on features such as introducing mobile boarding passes for airlines.

"We are already in advanced discussions with airports, airlines and OTAs and will have them powered by our platform in the coming weeks," said Krishnan.

Meanwhile, this is the first startup investment from InterGlobe Technology Quotient, created as a strategic business unit of InterGlobe Enterprises. InterGlobe Enterprises is a holding company for various business such as aviation, hospitality, etc and is best known as the promoter of India's top budget carrier IndiGo.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)