TLabs Showcase - Vayant

TLabs Showcase focus on startups featuring US and Europe-based Vayant.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Vayant is an industrial distribution platform for real-time flight search and pricing, with the ability to finalize bookings in the availability-delivery system of our clients’ choice. Our technology is cost effective and built on a set of powerful, proprietary algorithms that enable dynamic routing and pricing.

We reduce distribution costs by providing extremely focused, personalized search results that are significantly more likely to be converted into bookings – thus delivering higher ROI through the simultaneous reduction of Look-to-book (LTB) ratios, shortened pathway to booking and, over time, development of greater loyalty among our clients’ customers.

Our highly modular design lends itself to strategic partnerships with industry incumbents and is fully controllable by our clients. We serve airlines and alliances, online travel distributors and marketers and diversified airline technology/infrastructure providers.

Atanas Christov (CEO) is a graduate of Harvard Business School and his industry-related focus includes over 7 years of passenger pricing and distribution, fleet planning and strategic alliances for leading global airlines for McKinsey Consulting NYC. In his recent career he led AIG’s restructuring and divestiture efforts for the Commercial Aircraft Leasing division (ILFC) in the wake of the 2009 market crash. ILFC represents the world’s largest commercial jet aircraft fleet, serving over half of the world’s commercial airlines.
Eric Dumas (CCO) has spent a decade managing successful startups in Europe, Japan, and the US, with the bulk of his professional career straddling engineering and software development. He was previously Vice President and Country Manager at Tumbleweed (successful IPO and traded on Nasdaq) and PostPath.
Boyan “Bobby” Manev (Biz Dev) possesses over ten years of first hand experience in the online travel industry. He has worked closely with travel agencies, consolidators, and airlines throughout the European market including TUI and Alitalia, and in close partnership with both Worldspan and Galileo.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

New Europe Venture Equity LP (NEVEQ).

What problem are you trying to solve?

There is a better way to search for and price itineraries, and Vayant has found it.

Our technology provides results that are more directly relevant to the end consumer. Higher propensity of our client’s customers to book a solution from Vayant’s first set of results demonstrates our technology’s ability to significantly reduce inefficiencies related to delivery of large but substantially unused volumes of data prevailing in the industry today.

Describe the business, core products and services?

We look at data differently.

Vayant Search: We started from scratch, using “tabula rasa” algorithms to arrive at the most optimal solutions for any query, within a multitude of customizable parameters – and all within a single search.

Virtual Alliances: Modified split search rules within Vayant searches allows clients to consistently identify opportunities that are otherwise lost within traditional airline travel searches. This tool generates untapped itineraries within an expanded virtual network, allowing our clients to better serve their markets, and reach new ones.

Intelligent Cache: Vayant’s intelligent cache acts as the primary touch point for search queries and ensures that only focused queries are submitted to the client’s mainframe for a substantial reduction of IT/host ops costs.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

We will be launching with a well known meta-search engine.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Absolutely, with a well known meta-search engine and mid-size European airline at the head of the pack.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

We make money when our clients make money.

We’ve purposefully designed a revenue model that demonstrates our willingness to collaborate by aligning ourselves with our clients’ growth. Pricing is developed individually for each client and relies on licensing revenues generally based on number of revenue transactions enabled for our clients.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

Being the right technology for today’s industry – highly customizable design, seamless integration capabilities, complete source data, split ticketing, extremely focused search results

Weaknesses:

We’re newcomers to the scene, but we came to the party at the right time.

Opportunities:

Any player looking for a smarter way to search and price.

Threats:

Moving up the vision scale faster than we move across the ability scale.

Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?

There’s a lot of public opinion and published thoughts out there that say this space is just too complex and too convoluted to navigate. These are opinions were read and hear about every day, so in a way you can say there is a general mindset out there that is telling us we’re not going to make it in this industry.

We decided to listen to a greater message. Look at companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, Zappos, Virgin - these are companies that totally went in the face of that kind of thinking. We want to be part of the fundamental changes we see all around us.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

Anyone can get customers. In 12 months we want a select group of extremely satisfied clients who go on to become advocates of Vayant technology.