Travel Startups Incubator is pleased to announce our first investment in India with GoHero.ai. A standout among the growing number of Mobile Travel Chat (MTC) startups, smart personal travel concierge.
GoHero uses a combination of artificial and human intelligence to help travelers easily access a wide range of travel info and manage their bookings via text chat. The app is designed to make planning, booking, and managing travel easier than ever. GoHero provides a free, fun, user-friendly interface that saves travelers time and money. It also creates a traveler profile that allows it to provide recommendations and even price alerts for future trips.
The GoHero team includes co-founder and CEO Snehal Dhruve and co-founder and CFO Bineet Desai in Mumbai. GoHero was revamped to focus solely on the travel industry within weeks of its launch.
“After evaluating the business and considering various data points related to data availability, API access, profitability, turnover, and market size,” Desai notes, “we came to the conclusion that it was best to focus on a mature segment like travel, given the pain points an ordinary traveler faces.”
According to Dhruve, GoHero can help an Indian traveler “plan a holiday; buy trip essentials; order food; book a flight, cab, rail, or bus ticket…all through chat on an app.”
Noting that he and Desai are “passionate travelers,” Dhruve says their goal for GoHero is to help other Indian travelers get where they want to go without all the hassles most currently face. Just entering information about a planned trip on numerous travel websites in order to search for the best fares wastes considerable time, he points out, adding that even after all that effort, no personalization is provided on such sites.
“The travel customer experience is broken,” he states. “We are innovating in the space with a simple solution that keeps it personal and delightful for the consumer so they can accomplish complex tasks through a natural dialogue.”
Through its free, chat-based app, GoHero quickly and easily finds the best deals and books a selected itinerary for the user. In addition to comparing quotes from more than 1,000 travel websites for airfare, accommodations, and activities, the app also provides value-added services while a traveler is on the road that might include anything from booking a cab to providing information on regional cuisine or local restaurants. In short, GoHero.ai is an end-to-end personal travel manager designed to meet all of a traveler’s needs in a manner that is as efficient and personalized as possible.
According to Matt Zito, Managing Partner at Travel Startups Incubator, “GoHero has got off to a fast start booking over $40,000 in gross bookings and 6,000 registered travelers including a recent pilot test deal to provide employees of a large corporation in India with business travel services. Mobile Travel Chat or Travel Concierge is the next big thing to enter the travel industry.”
Mobile Travel Chat providers can provide more personalization and customization to travelers in real-time and can be “always on,” so there is an opportunity if executed properly to sell into the traveler’s entire trip cycle. This opportunity is the holly grail of the travel industry.
Lola, another MTC startup lead by ex. Kayak founders and a VC backed startup is leading the way in Mobile Travel Chat in the USA. GoHero.ai has a head start in India as one of the first MTC’s. Each major country in the world is going to have a few winners in this new emerging space.
A Brave New World – The Connected Traveler & Travel APIs: Understanding the Legal Realities of Travel APIs Series by Emmanuel Vranakis a technology and startup lawyer.
This blog is part of a series devoted to understanding the legal realities of travel APIs and what it takes to integrate with third party APIs. This series follows on Matt’s blogs last year on travel APIs[i]. The reason behind the series is to explain what the legal issues/risk areas are that travel startups need to cover off when negotiating an API licensing deal. (more…)
Today we are proud to introduce the TSI Platform: The first digital investment, advisory and innovation platform designed specifically to fund, advise, connect and help inspire travel technology startups. Here is a visualization of how we leveraged the Platform for one of our most recent entrants into the incubator, Biz Airlines:
Connections
The TSI Platform connects our startups, advisors/mentors, corporate travel partners and investors to each other. These are the four key stakeholder groups that we believe need a better way to work together in order to build great companies.
There is a large knowledge gap between entrepreneurs just starting out in the travel industry and those of us who have been in travel tech for a long time. It is time to close that gap through a digital platform that makes it easier for busy travel professionals to get involved, contribute, and reap the rewards.
Our Network
We continue to build the most robust network in the industry. It is now comprised of:
- 15 travel startups in our portfolio.
- 150+ startups on the platform looking for investment.
- 25 leading travel executives acting as advisors and mentors who work one-on-one with our startups.
- 4 Corporate Innovation partners who support the incubator from the ground up.
- 25+ Business Development partners who provide critical access to technology and resources.
- 100+ corporate travel executives from Innovation Labs, R&D, M&A and Corporate Sales departments we introduce to our startups for business development deals.
- 150+ investors subscribed to review follow-on investment opportunities in our top startups.
- 200+ members of the press who field and publish news about our startups.
Global and Virtual Presence
We believe that the future of investment and advisory/incubation services for startups will come from specialized domain verticals (ex. finance, health) with business operations conducted globally on digital platforms. We also believe that in order to find the next Uber or Airbnb we need to invest globally – we don’t believe that the best travel tech startups will always come out of Silicon Valley. Our next 2 investments are scheduled to be in India.
We are finding that the most talented and mature startup founders are looking for domain expertise, capital and a desire to stay in their home country or city to build their startup. The only efficient way to help these founders is to be domain specialized, have a global business network they can tap into and work mobile or virtually.
Transparency
We believe in being an open and transparent company with both our startups, the startup ecosystem and our corporate partners. Openness and transparency spawns authenticity which is a hallmark principle we aspire to.
We feel the best way to help our startups move the needle is to connect them to our corporate partners in an open environment, not in a closed door setting. The TSI Platform scales and provides global corporations the best opportunity for access to deal flow.
Scale
In only 1.5 years we have become one of the most active investors in the world in travel technology. We have invested in 15 startups located in the USA, UK, Africa, South America and India.
Grabr won the EyeforTravel’s Startup Awards and SeatWizer was runner-up as part of the 1-day Startup Village at the San Francisco Summit 2016. The Startup Village 1-day event included an entrepreneur panel, investor panel and 10 startups pitching. I was fortunate to be the moderator of the panels and a judge for the competition. Slide show pics from the event are below. Special thanks to Gavin Watson, Global Conference Director for EyeforTravel for organizing a fantastic event!
The Entrepreneur panel included, Heddi Cundle, Founder, MyTab.co, Jim Pickell, President, HomeExchange.com, Gadi Bashvitz, Founder & CEO, OLSET, Kerri Ann Zeil, Director, Amadeus for Startups and Sara Margulis, CEO, HoneyFund.
The Investor panel included, Nancy Hayes, Managing Director, Golden Seeds, Saaed Amidi, CEO and Founder, Plug and Play Tech Center, George Arabian, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Steelhead Ventures, Roopak Pati, Investment Banking Associate, Needham & Company.
The startup judges included, Matt Zito, Managing Partner, Travel Startups Incubator, George Arabian, Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Stealhead Ventures, Kerri Ann Zeil, Director, Amadeus for Startups, Zaid Al-Husseini, VP Product, Gogobot and Santiago Vallejo Head of Global Open Innovation at Carlson Wagonlit Travel.
Startups pitching at the event included Travel Startups Incubator portfolio companies FlitWays and Biz Airlines. Non-TSI startups included Tink You, POSH Adventures, Gruptrip, Lumanu, Inspirock and Stiya.
bd4travel wins the Travel Technology Disrupt award. See pics from the event below.
DUFL wins the Business Travel Disrupt award.
The Travel Startups Incubator team attended the Travel Technology Europe conference in London Feb 24,25. We helped market and sponsor the event, exhibited and Managing Partner, Matt Zito was a judge for the Travel Technology Disrupt Awards. It was an amazing conference, our 2nd year attending. We met close to 50 startups over 2-days. There were a few startups we really liked and we are hoping to start conversations with them about an investment when they apply to the incubator this month.
FlitWays one of the startups in our portfolio exhibited in the Business Travel area coming all the way from Los Angeles. Zacky Hamraz, Business Development & Marketing Manager at FlitWays told me that he had 12-15 meetings with suppliers every day. If your startup wants the opportunity to get in front of major travel brands that are looking to buy, license and integrate travel tech startup technology into their companies this event is a great opportunity and I’d highly recommend you look at attending next year.
