GoEuro has landed the biggest round yet given to a door-to-door travel startup, securing a $45 million investment from Goldman Sachs.
Other new investors include Atomico, Yuri Milner and Tom Stafford, Sebastian Siemiatkowski (Klarna) and Ilkka Paananen (Supercell).
The latest round, a Series B investment, comes just 16 months after its Series A to the tune of $27 million, in a package led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and included all of its previous investors in fresh raises: Battery Ventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, and Lakestar.
The company had also taken a $4 million in seed funding in March 2013.
Two and half a year old GoEuro is a consumer-facing service that allows users to search and book travel itineraries from rail, bus and air sectors.
It is working towards capturing what it claims to be a Euro 150 million market that is spent on the three forms of transport.
Other players in the market include Rome2Rio and RouterRank, although neither have captured the eye-watering levels of funding going into GoEuro so far.
GoEuro says it has 40 rail companies, 300 bus operators and every airline with a European network on its system.
Q&A with CEO Naren Shaam:
How will you "accelerate" the growth?
We are building a fully integrated search and booking platform for all rail, bus and air travel in Europe.
We're very happy with our progress so far, and we're already covering 11 countries in 2.5 years and 300+ partners -- more than anyone else we're aware of.
But we can take this a lot further still, we are "only" in 11 countries in Europe and this additional funding will help us continue to invest in our coverage as well as product, team, and user acquisition.
It's a very large round? Why so big?
Rail, bus and air travel in Europe is a huge market. On the order of 500m population, 600m international visitors, and €150 billion in gross booking value every year.
Building a fully integrated search and booking platform with a seamless user experience for this market takes a bit of investment.
What percentage will be spent on marketing?
We have been pretty conservative about our marketing spend and we don't believe in spray-and-pray. But we will certainly be able to drive user growth more aggressively in some places now.
What's the company headcount at the moment?
150 employees from 32 countries. Almost 40% women, and 100% a great team.
Will you expand to other continents? What's the timescale for that?
Don't underestimate the size of the challenge here in Europe. It's a very big, and very fragmented market, and a majority of it is still offline or sold at the stations.
Building a great tool for anyone travelling by rail, bus or air, anywhere in Europe, takes some time.
Having said that, there are definitely some other parts of the world where travellers would benefit from our product like most of Asia and Latin America.
SWOT analysis of the current business?
Awesome team, great partners in the rail, bus and air industry, fantastic investors, and a product that already covers 40+ rail partners and more than 300 bus companies, in addition to all airlines in multiple languages. That's the S.
Opportunities are plenty to expand coverage, growth, product lines, business models etc. We spend most of our time on this :)
What's to stop an existing metasearch engine just doing all this themselves?
I'm afraid that's a question you'll have to ask them, not us.
Speaking after the announcement was made on Wednesday, Rome2Rio CEO Rod Cuthbert says:
"Investments like this are great for the company involved but also have a positive knock-on effect for that market sector. I expect we'll now see the same focus on multi-modal that we've seen over the last couple of years on tours and activities.
"If that's the case then companies like Rome2rio, Loco2, Captain Train and The Trainline will all come under greater scrutiny from investors and possible buyers.
"The other thing to note is that this investment makes clear that multi-modal companies are interesting in their own right, not simply as incubators for technology and booking functionality that can be integrated into an existing OTA or 'traditional' meta player."