TripHobo, a crowd-sourced trip planning service, has attracted Series A funding from Indian venture capital firm, Kalaari Capital.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TripHobo told Tnooz that the investment is in the region of $1 million to $3.5 million.
The Punem India-based company (TLabs here and formerly known as JoGuru) says it will be using the latest injection new fund to improve the platform, scale the number of itineraries and content for destinations.
TripHobo is also planning to raise another round of funding in the next 18 months.
Following this investment, Vani Kola, managing director of Kalaari Capital, will be joining the board of TripHobo.
Kola says:
"The travel industry is ripe for the next era of innovation and TripHobo is perfectly placed to capitalize on this. The platform is intelligent and the team understands travellers leveraging online services to plan and book their travel. We believe TripHobo can be the next big global brand from India and are truly excited to partner with them."
Founded in 2012 by Praveen Kumar, Karthik Ramachandra and Saket Newaskar, the company earlier secured $200,000 in angel investment from a private investor.
Kumar says:
"Today’s young travelers demand a smarter way to plan their holidays. They don’t have the patience to sift through the highly fragmented travel information available. The typical trip planning process takes weeks and is.
"TripHobo is changing the way users approach this by providing an intuitive, graphical and fun platform where the user actually enjoy the process of trip planning. The rapid user adoption and the amount of time users are spending on our platform repeatedly, validates the need for such an innovation in the travel space."
Competitors of TripHobo include mygola, Traverik, Tripomatic, Plnnr, and Utrip.
Newaskar told Tnooz that the site currently gets 40-45% of traffic from the US, about 30-35% from Europe and South America, and about 25% from India.
Totally, there are over 25,000 itineraries created by users in the system. Majority of these itineraries are for South East Asian destinations including Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong.
Currently, there are 23 employees in the company, but it is planning to add another 6 members to the team.
On the marketing front, the company is planning to reach out to as many users as possible and ask them to try TripHobo, it is also planning for a number of social media marketing initiatives.
In the coming months, TripHobo will expose its trip planning service as an API for brands to consume.
When asked Newaskar about the reason for the company's decision to change its name from JoGuru to TripHobo, he says:
"JoGuru - the name doesn't bring out the fact that we are a travel industry company, it has an Indian-style to it because of the use of word "guru", also we are a crowdsourced platform for travel itineraries, so it doesn't really make sense to call ourselves as a "guru". Also, we saw a lack in brand recall for JoGuru.
"We chose the name TripHobo because users can relate the brand to travel industry because of the word "Trip", and the word "Hobo" goes a long way into history where it was used to refer a migratory worker. But, now, we call "Hobo" as one who works so that they can travel."