Musement, a new tours and activities site and mobile app, said it has received Euro 5 million in Series A funding.
Participating in this round are venture firms P101, 360 Capital Partners, Francesco Micheli Associati, and Italian Angels for Growth.
It had raised more than 800,000 euro in a seed round.
Global ambitions
The year-and-a-half old Milan-based startup has inventory in Europe, though its aspirations are global. This year it plans to add listings in the United States and Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. In 2016, it hopes to add cities in Asia and be credible globally by 2017.
In the meantime, CEO Alessandro Petazzi plans to consolidate in Italy, France, and Spain, expanding its net to catch Funfairs and gastronomic experiences and not just traditional museums and city tours.
B2B play
By April, it plans to open a business-to-business channel with travel agencies, sharing a part of its margins with agents who don't want to miss out on the growth of last-minute, spontaneous, mobile-based bookings.
Partner agencies will be able to access the commissionable product via a new extranet.
Curation instead of open platform
Museument takes a "curated" approach. This is a model originally used by on demand app HotelTonight. It simplifies the options for users on mobile devices.
Curation makes sure that suppliers see a high volume of referrals, which enables the company to learn lessons more quickly than if it were to hand just one or two referrals to hundreds of suppliers each.
Tours-and-activities aggregator GetYourGuide, based in Berlin, prefers an open platform model, rather than curation, on the theory that scale and "flooding the zone" is the best strategy. It has been on a hiring spree since its $25 million Series B round last summer.
Tours-and-activities leader Viator originally started with a curated model. But the San Francisco-based company abandoned it after its acquisition by TripAdvisor for $200 million last year. (See our earlier story, "Viator to move from curated to open platform.")
UPDATE 10pmET: Viator says that its open-listings platform was in development before its acquisition by TripAdvisor. Sorry for the error. It also says that it will continue to seek out and vet operators at the most popular destination, while the open-listings program is supplementary and helps with scale.
UPDATE 13:40 ET: Petazzi tells Tnooz:
"If you look at our product now, we are well aware that it still looks a lot like 'a smaller Viator (or GYG)'. Yet one-year from now, we plan to be in a very different place, from a number of points of view.
I guess it is this vision (plus the good metrics) which convinced our investors. Interesting times ahead."
See last summer's Tnooz profile of Musement. In bocca al lupo!