Boxever has signed US tour operator InterRail as its first customer in North America.
The Dublin-based customer intelligence specialist has been making steady progress in the past year starting with $6 million in funding in March 2014 which Boxever chief executive Dave O'Flanagan said would be used to accelerate growth.
Since then it has signed a number of customers including Ryanair, Air New Zealand and eDreams Odigeo and most recently opened an office in Boston as its first step to establishing its presence there.
O'Flanagan says the market has moved on with an awakening from travel companies of the value in customer data and adds that customers are seeing gains in conversion rates of between 3 to 15% (depending on what was already in place) from emails, abandoned cart campaigns and other initiatives.
While the realisation has dawned and the desire is there, he says there has not been much action and it's still about tentative steps and the vision to apply customer intelligence principles across the whole of an organisation as opposed to a single department.
Some of the challenges around legacy systems have now been solved, he adds, so now companies are asking themselves how they can actually use the data.
In addition, different segments of the industry are at different stages when it comes to better use of customer data with online travel agencies generally a bit further ahead of airlines because many of them were technology driven to start with.
Airlines, however, are catching up and says O'Flanagan, realising the value of their own websites in competing with the online intermediaries.
In the short-term pipeline for Boxever is technology to help airlines sell more during flights with an announcement planned within the next couple of months.
Longer term, it wants to add a further 10 customers this year and O'Flanagan says it is already of schedule with four to be announced in the next few weeks.
"We've made good progress and as a small b2b in a big space and in an industry that is hard to sell into."
Further funds are not an immediate need as the appetite for services such as Boxever's increases. However, the company has ambitions to grow aggressively and has brought former Skype financial chief Laura Shesgreen on board as chief financial officer.