Toronto-based SnapTravel
has closed a $21.2 million Series A funding round, adding $13.2 million in new
investments to its initial raise of $8 million in July 2017.
New investors include NBA player Stephen Curry and Telstra Ventures.
SnapTravel enables
users to book hotels through text and voice interactions on Facebook Messenger,
WhatsApp, SMS, iMessage, RCS messaging, Viber, Slack and Alexa.
The system uses machine learning, natural language processing and,
when necessary, human agents to curate offers directly from hotel brands and partners
including Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Sabre and Amadeus.
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“Online hotel booking
is an incredibly transactional and noisy process, where pop-ups and expiring
offers inundate consumers,” says SnapTravel co-founder and CEO Hussein Fazal.
“We are reimagining
this experience - making booking hotels feel as natural and personal as talking
to a friend. Beyond travel, we're at the start of a shift in which consumers no
longer shop on individual websites or apps, but entirely via conversations with
brands.”
Since its founding in 2016, the company says it has had
conversations with more than two million consumers in more than 150 countries.
In 2018, SnapTravel
says it has surpassed $50 million in sales, a 450% increase from 2017, and 94%
of its bookings have happened without human involvement.
“Conversational
commerce is an area of immense opportunity and interest for us, and the level
of consumer adoption that SnapTravel has achieved in this space so far is
extraordinary,” says Liron Wand, Facebook Messenger's head of partnerships.
“This is not only a
unique approach to booking hotels, but also a new outlook on commerce as a
whole. We're partnering with SnapTravel to create seamless experiences for
Facebook users today, and design what message-driven commerce looks like in the
next five years.”
SnapTravel says it will use the funding to develop the platform’s
machine learning and natural language processing technology.