Germany-based airline distribution and booking startup Flyiin has raised a €2.4 million financing round.
The injection of capital, the first in the company's history, comes from a group of United States-based, mostly unnamed angel investors who, it says, are "closely associated with the airline sector."
One high-profile figure who has backed Flyinn is Montie Brewer, a long-time adviser to the company and former CEO of Air Canada.
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The core product is a booking system for resellers and intermediaries (known as Airline DirectConnect) that is still under construction, including provision to host ancillary services and utilizing NDC standards to connect between parties.
The money will be used to release a first version of the product in a live environment, including adding more airline APIs, as well as adding new team members. A pilot customer for the tool is Qixxit.
Pivot time
The company was created in 2015 by Stephane Pingaud, a former Amadeus marketing executive in its distribution team until 2008 when he left to work on the Cost4Travel startup until 2010.
Flyiin was originally built as a consumer-facing service for air bookings. It switched to a B2B model in the summer of 2018.
Pingaud says: "Slowly but surely, we realized though that our marketplace model would require more time before it could effectively and fully replace the older OTA and metasearch models.
"We’ve also been witnessing increasing demand from emerging travel resellers for a 'toolkit' that will enable them to easily sell air travel to their users in a user-centric way.
"For these travel resellers, easily means not having to go through the somehow difficult process of integrating a GDS booking engine into their digital product, nor be the merchant of record and settle through BSP. We decided to grasp this opportunity and reposition Flyiin as the technology partner of choice for these emerging travel resellers."