Headout, a mobile application for tours and activities, has raised $1.8 million in seed funding to continue its expansion across US cities.
Funding for the company which is live in New York and Las Vegas comes from Version One Ventures, 500 Startups, Nexus Venture Partners and Arena Ventures.
There was also participation from Angellist’s Maiden Lane Ventures, Funders Club, Haystack Fund, Ludlow Ventures, Dreamit Ventures as well as a number of angel investors.
The company originally started out as Tourlandish (Startup pitch here), a Bangalore-based tours and activities platform, but decided to pivot and move to the US to build Headout.
Co-founder and chief executive Varun Khona explains:
"The pivot was a very straightforward decision. Our data and all our interactions with our users laid out one fact in front of us - travelers only book tours and activities when they are already in the destination and mostly for the next few hours.
"That's precisely why the existing marketplaces all over the world in this space have hardly managed to shift the industry online as they have almost no or negligible on-demand inventory available in the last few hours before the start of an activity."
He adds that with the huge trend towards mobile services in travel there is an opportunity for a brand to be built on mobile which delivers on-demand services.
" This is the holy grail that will not just shift purchasing behaviour from offline to online but also open up a whole new category of consumers and providers leading to overall expansion of the entire tours industry."
Headout aims to be in 12 cities by the end of the year including Chicago, Washington DC and Miami.