Viajala, the Latin American travel metasearch startup, has landed $500,000 in seed funding.
Venture capital firm Altabix led the equity round. It is a subsidiary of Hoteles City Express, Mexico's fastest growing hotel chain, whose chief financial officer Roberto Palacios will join Viajala's board of managers.
Other investors participating include Socialatom Ventures, Ruta-N, Wayra from Telefónica, and angel investors Andrés Barreto and Diego Saez-Gil.
CEO Thomas Allier told Tnooz:
"We will focus on growing our product development team so we will mostly hire engineers and designers.
We are currently looking for back-end and front-end developers in Medellin, Colombia to help us iterate faster on our flight and hotel verticals, and improve our in-house marketing tools."
The startup currently has 7 full-time employees and 1 part-time that it expects to turn full-time soon.
Allier's team is also working on B2B products.
On the consumer side, Viajala recently partnered with French ride-sharing community BlaBlaCar in Mexico, CostaMar (the leading Peruvian Travel Agency), PriceTravel (one of the largest Mexican OTAs), among other travel suppliers.
It is the first regional online travel site to integrate all of them.
The startup has also partnered with TrustYou to show our users their hotel review content.
Viajala says it lists 595,000 hotels, hostels and vacation rentals, and its marketing has focused first on the Andean region and Mexico. It says it averages 500,000 users a month now, nine times what it averaged a year ago.
READ THIS NEXT: Tnooz's profile of Viajala