Ah, to be young and working in Berlin in late summer.
Even better, to be young working for a two-year-old travel technology start-up in the hip Prenzlauer Berg district at precisely the time when the company receives a Euro 20 million investment.
It may sound like something out of a Gary Shteyngart novel or a Gideon Lewis-Kraus article or a Monocle advertorial, but it's the reality today of 60 employees at GoEuro, the multi-modal travel platform start-up.
The company, which aims to streamline the booking of air, bus, and rail to cover every mile of a trip, says today it has raised $27 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and included all of its previous investors in fresh raises: Battery Ventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, and Lakestar.
GoEuro has broad coverage in seven European countries and some service in another five. It says it will have big announcements on its mobile product front by the end of the year. It doesn't yet offer an API to third-parties.
Founded in Berlin in 2012, the start-up has 60 full-time employees in Germany. About 40% of its staff are women -- demonstrating a rare gender balance for a travel technology start-up.
It plans to use the funding to dramatically scale up in size.
CEO Naren Shaam tells Tnooz that his pitch to new employees is to promise them the exciting challenge of building a platform that normalizes thousands of non-standardized data points and produces new types of search results that are truly point-A-to-Point-B.
Shaam says the company is receiving a lot of in-bound interest from travel operators. It's benefiting from the tailwind of deregulation that sweeping Europe.
For instance, in 2013, Germany busted up Deutsche Bahn's monopoly on the bus market, and the country has since seen a boom in new operators and a doubling in long-distance journeys taken.
Added Itzik Parnafes, a Battery Ventures general partner, in a statement:
"Anyone who has booked a train or bus ticket in Europe will immediately understand how GoEuro is revolutionizing the travel industry."
Earlier this year, Shaam outlined his goal for the company in a Tnooz article.