On April 30, 2019 at the TSI Travel API & Microservices Tech Symposium, CEO Trideep Aggarwal of TWAI met with CEO, Varun Bansal of Airlines Technology. After the Symposium the two CEO’s engaged and started to discuss an API licensing deal. The licensing interest turned to acquisition talks. On January 28, 2020 the companies publicly announced the acquisition.
As early investors in Airlines Technology, TSI believes the TWAI acquisition will help Airlines Technology commercialize the NDC API with 19 airlines globally through TWAI’s TripMole and their large agency customer base. “We launched the first Travel API & Microservices Tech Symposium on April 30, 2019 bringing together 30 global companies for the sole focus of meeting one-on-one to facilitate pilots and licensing of APIs, Microservices and new technologies. We held 150 meetings in 8-hours with 10 of the largest travel companies in the world and 20 emerging travel tech startups in attendance. We didn’t initially see acquisitions coming out of the Symposiums, but that is exactly what happened from the TWAI and Airlines Technology meeting, said, Matt Zito, Managing Partner of TSI.”
Below is a slide showing the engagement and deals that were derived from attendees meeting 1:1 at the April 30th Symposium.
On Jan 7, 2020, TSI held the 2nd Travel API & Microservices Symposium and launched an inaugural TSI Travel Tech Investment Symposium on Jan 8, 2020. The investment Symposium brought together 21 investors and 18 emerging travel tech companies for 1-day of 1:1 meetings between investors and startup founders. Feedback is just starting to trickle in. We know one company has been funded by multiple investors that attended and another 5-10 companies will likely receive funding over the next 4-12 months.
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