Jakarta-based flight booking service
Traveloka has raised series A funding from
Global Founders Capital, the venture capital arm of
Rocket Internet.
The value of the investment is undisclosed but the company claims it is "in line with other Series A investments in the region".
Traveloka was launched in September 2012. A month later, the company raised funding from early stage investment firm
East Ventures and also served over 400,000 flight searches for users from more than 200 different cities.
Today, the website claims it serves the same number every few days.
Traveloka was initially launched as a metasearch website and later started offering booking service in its website.
The company is going to spend the new investment on its growth plan, recruitment and add new services such as hotels and package trips.
According to
ComScore, Traveloka is ranked as Indonesia's number one flight search and booking service (apart from the direct airline websites).
Managing director Ferry Unardi says:
“We don't only provide best flight deals. The combination of our simple, instructive and compelling transactional interface is none to be found elsewhere. In the booking process, users learn to plan their travel smarter and hence more effective.”
Competitors of Traveloka include NusaTrip (TLabs here), Tiket.com, Ticktab.com, PegiPegi.com, Hoterip.com and Tiket2.com.
Tnooz spoke to Unardi regarding the funding:
How is the Indonesian travel industry performing now, with new players like NusaTrip offering very competitive flight prices? Are there more travel startups to come?
The online travel landscape in Indonesia, although crowded, is far from being mature. There are very few services which are reliable and accessible enough for most people to use.
Especially in the flight space, given that the majority of the airlines are not connected to GDS, it is technically difficult to have a reliable service and many of the sites are already having issues with scaling up. On a positive note, so far we were pleasantly surprised at the rapid growth of the market.
We are confident that once the basic OTA/transactional segment is fully developed, there will be a better ecosystem and other types of more innovative travel startups can flourish.
Currently, you are serving only flight bookings. Will you be venturing into other verticals like hotels, car rentals?
Yes, we are looking to be full-service since we think there's a gap in the market right now for a more comprehensive service.
Are you also planning to make your website multi-lingual?
Yes, we are definitely keeping internationalization in mind when we're developing the service, although the current focus is on Indonesia.