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un-enfant-immature · 4 years

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Omio takes $100M to shuttle through the coronavirus crisis

Multimodal travel platform Omio (formerly GoEuro) has raised $100M in late stage funding to help see its business through the coronavirus crisis. It also says it’s eyeing potential M&A opportunities within the hard-hit sector.

New and existing investors in the Berlin -based startup participated in the late stage convertible note, although omio isn’t disclosing any new names. Among the list of returning investors are: Temasek, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs, NEA and Kleiner Perkins. Omio’s business has now pulled in around $400M in total since being founded back in 2013 — with the prior raise being a $150M round back in 2018.

In a supporting statement on the latest raise, Georgi Ganev, CEO of Kinnevik, said: “We are very impressed how fast and effective Omio adapted to such an unprecedented crisis for the global travel industry. The management team has delivered quickly and we can see the robustness of the business model which is well diversified across markets and transport modes. We are looking forward to supporting Omio on its way to become the go-to destination for travellers across the world.”

While COVID-19 has thrown up major headwinds to global tourism and travel — with foreign trips discouraged by specific government quarantine requirements, and the overarching requirement for people to maintain social distancing meaning certain types of holidays or activities are less attractive or even feasible, Omio is nonetheless sounding upbeat — reporting a partial recovery in bookings this summer in Europe.

In Germany and France it says bookings are above 50% of the pre-COVID-19 level at this point, despite only “marginal” marketing spend over the crisis period.

Its business is likely better positioned than some in the travel space to adapt to changes in how people are moving around and holidaying, given it caters to multiple modes of transport. The travel aggregator platform spans flights, rail, buses and even ferry routes, allowing users to quickly compare different modes of transport for their planned journey.

More recently Omio has added car sharing and car rentals to its platform, including via a partnership with rentalcars.com. So as travellers in Europe have adapted to living with COVID-19 — perhaps opting to take more local trips and/or avoiding mass transit when they go on holiday — it’s in a strong position to cater to changing demand through its partnerships with ground transportation networks and providers.

“That diversification in terms of not depending on a single mode of transport has really helped the business come back much stronger, because we’re not depending on — for example — air or bus,” CEO and founder Naren Shaam tells TechCrunch. “The diversification has helped us.”

“People will travel a lot more to smaller regions, explore the countryside a little more,” he predicts, suggesting the current dilution of travel focus it’s seeing — away from usual tourist hotspot destinations in favor of a broader, more rural mix of places — augurs a wider shift to more a diversified, more sustainable type of travel being here to stay.

“It’s not longer just airport to airport travel,” he notes. “People are traveling to where they want to go — and it’s a lot more distributed across geographies, where people want to explore. A platform like ours can accelerate this behaviour because we serve, not just flights, but trains, buses, even ferries etc, you can actually reach any destination with us.”

Direct booking via Omio’s platform is possible where it has partner agreements in place (so not universally across all routes, though it may still be able to offer route planning info).

Its multimodal booking mix extends to 37 countries in Europe and North America — where it launched at the start of this year. Last year it acquired Rome2Rio, bulking out its global flight and transport planning inventory. The grand vision is “all transport, end to end, in a single product”, as Shaam puts it — although executing on that means continuing to build out partnerships and integrations across its market footprint.

Asked whether the new funding will give Omio enough headroom to see it through the current coronavirus crisis, Shaam tells TechCrunch: “The unknown unknown is how long the crisis lasts. But as we can see if the crisis lasts a couple of years we will make it through that.”

He says the raise will help the business come out of the crisis “stronger” — by enabling Omio to spend on adapting its product to meet changing consumer demand, such as the shift to ground transportation. “All of those things we can use these capital to shape the future of how the travel industry actually interacts with consumers,” he suggests.

Another shift in the industry that’s been triggered by the coronavirus relates to consumer expectations around information. In short, people expect a lot more travel intel up front.

“We have hypotheses on what comes back [post-crisis]. I think travel will be a lot more information centric, especially coming out of COVID-19. Customers will seek clarity in the near term around basic information around what regions can I travel to, do I need to quarantine, do I need to wear a mask inside the train etc,” he says.

“But that’ll drive a type of consumer behavior where they are seeking more information and companies will need to provide this information to satisfy the consumer needs of the future. Because consumers are getting used to having relevant information at the right point in time. So it’s not a data dump of all information… it’s when I get to the train station, what do I need to do?

“Each of those is almost hyperlocal in terms of information and that’s going to drive a change in consumer behaviour.”

Omio’s initial response to this need for more information up front was the launch of a hub — called the Open Travel Index — where users can look up information on restrictions related to specific destinations to help them plan their journey.

However he admits it’s a struggle to keep up with requirements that can switch over night (in one recent example, the UK added France to a list of countries from which returning travellers must self quarantine for two weeks — leading to a mad dash by scores of holidaymakers trying to beat a 4am deadline to get back on UK soil).

“This is a product we launched about a month and a half ago that tells you, if you’re based in the UK, where you can go in Europe,” he says. “We need to update it faster because information’s changing very, very quickly — so it’s on us now to figure out how to keep up with the constant changes of information.”

Discussing other COVID-19 changes, Shaam points to the shift to apps that’s being accelerated by the public health crisis — a trend that’s being replicated in multiple industries of course, not just travel.

“More than half of the ground transport industry was booked at a kiosk at a station [before COVID-19]. So this will drive a clear change with people uncomfortable touching a kiosk button,” he adds, arguing that that shift will help create better consumer products in the sector.

“If you imagine the kind of consumer products that the app/web world has created you can imagine that should come to the consumer experiences in travel,” he suggests. “So these are the things, I think, that will come in terms of consumer behavior and it’s up to us to make sure that we lead that change as a company.”

“We’re investing quite heavily in some of the other shifts that we’re seeing — in terms of days to departure, flexibility of fares, more insurance type products so you can cancel,” he adds. “We’re also trying to help customers in terms of whether they can go.

“We’re investing heavily in routing so you can connect modes of transport, not just flights, so you can travel longer distances with just trains. And we’re also in talks with all our suppliers to say hey, how can we help you come back — because not all suppliers are state monopolies. There’s a lot of small, medium suppliers on our product and we want to bring them back as well so we’re investing there as well.”

On M&A, Shaam says growth via acquisition is “definitely on the radar for us”. Though he also says it’s not top of the priority list right now.

“We’ve actively got our ears out. More so now, going forward, than looking back — because the last four months, imagine what we went through as a travel company, I just wanted to stablize that situation and bring us to a stable position,” he says.

“We are still in COVID-19. The situation’s not yet over, so our primary goal coming out of this is very much investing in the shifts in consumer behavior in our core product… Any M&A acquisitions we’ll do is more opportunistic, based on [factors like] pricing and what’s happening in the industry.

“But more of our capital and my time and everything will go a lot more to build the future of transport. Because that’s going to change so much more for so many millions of consumers that use our product today.”

There is still plenty of work that can be done on Omio’s core proposition — aka, linking up natural travel search for consumers by knitting together a diverse mix and range of service providers in a way that shrinks the strain of travel planning, and building out support for even more multifaceted trips people might wish to take in future.

“No one brings the natural search for consumers. Consumers just want to go London to Portsmouth. They don’t say ‘London Portsmouth train’. They do that today because that’s what the industry forces them to do — so by enabling this core product to work where you can search any modes of transport, anywhere in Europe, one click to buy, everything is a simple, mobile ticket, and you use the whole product on the app — that’s the big driver for the industry,” Shaam adds.

“On top of that you’ve got shifts towards ground transport, shifts towards app, shifts towards sustainability, which is a big topic — even pre-COVID-19 — that we can actually help drive even more change coming out of this. These are the bigger opportunities for us.”

Uncertainty clearly remains a constant for the travel sector now that COVID-19 has become a terrible ‘new normal’. So even with an unexpected summer travel bump in Europe it remains to be seen what will happen in the coming months as the region moves from summer to winter.

“In general the overall business outlook we’re taking is purely something of more caution,” says Shaam. “We just don’t know. Anything at all with respect to COVID-19, no one knows, basically. I’ve seen a number of reports in the industry but no one really knows. So in general our outlook is one of caution. And that’s why we were surprised in our uptick already through the summer. We didn’t even expect that kind of growth with near zero marketing spend levels.”

“We’ll adapt,” he adds. “The business is high variable costs so we can scale up and down fairly easily, so it’s asset light and these things help us adapt. And let’s see what happens in the winter.”

Over in the US — where Omio happened to launch slightly ahead of the COVID-19 crisis — he says it’s been a very different story, with no bookings bump. “No surprise, given the situation there,” he says, emphasizing the importance of government interventions to help control the spread of the virus.

“Governments play a very important role here. Europe has done a superior job compared to a lot of other regions in the world… But entire economies [in the region] depend on tourism,” he says. “Hopefully entire [European] countries shouldn’t go into shutdowns again because the systems are strong enough to identify local spike in cases and they ring fence it very quickly and can act on it. It’s the same as us as a company. If there’s a second wave we know how to react because we’ve gone through this horrible phrase one… So using those learnings and applying them quickly I think will help stabilize the industry as a whole.”

#TechCrunch

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catastrophesblood · 5 years

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Omio acquires fellow multi-modal platform Rome2Rio

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dpietsch · 4 years

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RT @DilmaghaniF: Naren Shaam ist in Indien aufgewachsen, in Harvard studiert und hat bewusst in #Berlin gegründet. Sein smartes Reiseportal #Omio ist eine der wertvollsten Tech-Firmen Deutschlands und hat gerade 100 Mio. $ von Investoren erhalten. Große Leistung. Und #Bild titelt diesen Dreck: https://t.co/wGiVWhaB9g

Naren Shaam ist in Indien aufgewachsen, in Harvard studiert und hat bewusst in #Berlin gegründet. Sein smartes Reiseportal #Omio ist eine der wertvollsten Tech-Firmen Deutschlands und hat gerade 100 Mio. $ von Investoren erhalten. Große Leistung. Und #Bild titelt diesen Dreck: pic.twitter.com/wGiVWhaB9g

— Farhad Dilmaghani (@DilmaghaniF) August 20, 2020

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danielschneider · 4 years

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Hey @bild — the 100 Mio fundraise for @Omio by Naren Shaam, @JKemperB, @borisontherun et al is super impressive and very good news for an entire industry. And THIS is the headline you come up with? There has to be a better way. pic.twitter.com/Gik4Hp7wSv

— Uwe Horstmann (@uwehorstmann) August 19, 2020

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flyingbizdeals · 4 years

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Booking app Omio raises $100 million in travel recovery bet

BERLIN Berlin travel-booking app Omio said on Wednesday it had raised $100 million in backing to expand its business and make acquisitions as the industry recovers from the blow dealt by the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the height of the viral outbreak, Omio went into “keep-the-lights-on” mode and put 90% of its staff on furlough, founder and CEO Naren Shaam told Reuters, but its team of 350 is now…

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#business #business news #business news worldwide

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endenogatai · 4 years

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Omio takes $100M to shuttle through the coronavirus crisis

In Germany and France it says bookings are above 50% of the pre-COVID-19 level at this point, despite only “marginal” marketing spend over the crisis period.

��People will travel a lot more to smaller regions, explore the countryside a little more,” he predicts, suggesting the current dilution of travel focus it’s seeing — away from usual tourist hotspot destinations in favor of a broader, more rural mix of places — augurs a wider shift to more a diversified, more sustainable type of travel being here to stay.

Direct booking via Omio’s platform is possible where it has partner agreements in place (so not universally across all routes, though it may still be able to offer route planning info).

Another shift in the industry that’s been triggered by the coronavirus relates to consumer expectations around information. In short, people expect a lot more travel intel up front.

“Each of those is almost hyperlocal in terms of information and that’s going to drive a change in consumer behaviour.”

On M&A, Shaam says growth via acquisition is “definitely on the radar for us”. Though he also says it’s not top of the priority list right now.

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computer-basics · 4 years

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Travel aggregator Omio, which operates a multimodal transport planning and booking platform for intercity and long distance tips, has hopped over the pond to launch in North America — its first market outside its home base of Europe.

From today, consumers in the U.S. and Canada can use Omio’s website or app to compare prices, schedules, duration and other variables for more than 23,000 train and bus routes across the two markets — with booking also baked into the platform. As well as wheeled regional intercity transport options the trip planner tool lets users view, compare and book flights.

Omio says it’s partnered with “leading transport providers” in North America including Amtrak, VIA Rail Canada, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, OurBus and Academy for launch — saying “more routes and providers will be added through the year”.

In total it says it’s partnered with more than 800 transport providers across Europe and North America.

Just over a year ago the Berlin-based startup — formerly known as GoEuro — revealed it was rebranding, announcing an ambition to take its platform global, saying it would rely on an “a la carte” menu of products it had built up to cater to different-sized travel providers since the business was founded in 2013 to help it expand further a field and scale the business globally. Although CEO and founder, Naren Shaam, told us it was still deciding on its first stop beyond Europe at that point — with the US, South America and Asia all in the mix then.

In the event Omio has opted for North America — in spite of the region’s heavy reliance on flights for domestic and regional travel, given a relative paucity of high speed rail infrastructure.

Last February Shaam also told us Omio didn’t want to launch a “lightweight” flight-only product in the U.S. — which likely explains why the launch has been in the works for almost a year as it worked to put in place enough train and bus partnerships to support “thousands” of on-the-ground transport options at launch.

Omio says travellers from North American currently make up around 10% of its customer base — and claims an average of 27M monthly users overall (from more than 120 countries) — giving it a monthly baseline of circa 2.7M U.S. and Canadian users who it can start to nudge towards domestic travel planning, not just foreign trips, and thereby grow usage in a major market.

It also recently acquired rival travel planner startup, Rome2Rio — beefing up its global transport network with transport search and discovery options for more than 10M locations worldwide.

Asked why it picked North America for its first global market expansion, Shaam told TechCrunch: “America is sometimes seen as a market dominated by air and private car, yet there is a huge opportunity for ground transportation (around $8BN according to our data) in specific parts of the USA in particular.

“This, combined with the fact that around 10% of our existing customer base travelling in Europe is from the US and/or Canada, means it’s a compelling market for us. South America and parts of Asia are still markets we’re actively interested in — we don’t see it particularly as a question of either/or but have chosen to focus resources on North America to start with. Plus, our product market fit is natural in certain corridors. Like NE corridor, where with a little bit of effort we can meaningfully create a superb experience for customers there.”

He said Omio will focus initially on digital marketing (“across a range of channels”) to grow usage in the region, including looking to do so via partnerships. “We expect to test and learn in terms of the exact shape and spend,” he added.

On competitive landscape Shaam says Omio has various competitors in different markets — but named Wanderu in the U.S.

“We believe there’s a number of things that set us apart from other search or booking platforms,” he added, discussing differentiation. “In particular, it’s possible to directly compare different modes at-a-glance and then book them onsite with Omio. This means customers benefit from our easy-to-use platform all the way from search to post-booking, including our customer service. Secondly, our breadth of inventory: We offer trains, bus, flight, as well as ferries and airport transports. Many of our competitors offer just one or two modes, so consumers don’t have the opportunity to fully compare their options.

“Our app is also a key differentiator: it’s free to use (and no need to register just to try it out) and was recently named one of the best ‘Everyday Essentials’ by Google.”

Shaam declined to specify Omio’s target for user growth in its first year in North America, saying only: “We hope to see our product become part of the everyday for travelers, and especially those already familiar with us from their European travels.”

Asked where else its global expansion plan might take it this year he pointed to the Rome2Rio acquisition, saying that’s something it’s building on — to give it “reach into other countries”.

“Right now, as well launching in North America our focus is on continuing to expand within Europe both in terms of geography and modes of transport, for example with ferries and airport transfers,” he noted, adding that the expansion plans “don’t stop there”.

“We’re also building on our recent acquisition of Rome2Rio which, as we begin to link parts of the two products together, will give us reach into other countries. And we’re continuing to look at completely new markets; we’ll share more when the time is right,” he added.

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tripstations · 5 years

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Omio buys Rome2Rio to build out its global travel aggregator business – TechCrunch

Omio (née GoEuro) has acquired multimodal journey veteran Rome2rio as it really works on constructing out a world journey aggregator enterprise, having taken the choice to zoom out from its dwelling market of Europe earlier this 12 months.

Monetary particulars of the transaction are usually not being disclosed. However Omio raised a $150M funding spherical a 12 months in the past so it’s presumably splashing a portion of that capital now.

It’s not Omio’s first acquisition (others have included BusRadar for beefing up its bus search capabilities). However it appears to be like to be the primary with its eye on a broader international enterprise horizon.

Rome2rio relies in Melbourne, Australia, and gives search instruments for travellers protecting a number of transportation choices all world wide.

Some 10 million areas are coated by its product which serves outcomes for greater than 5,000 prepare, bus, flight, ferry and intra-city public transportation operators.

The 2010 based startup has some 18 million customers per thirty days. It had solely raised a really small quantity of VC over almost a decade of operations, per Crunchbase.

Omio says it can keep Rome2rio as a separate model, so the corporate shall be working two journey aggregator manufacturers going ahead. The businesses will collaborate to “create new and higher experiences” for international travellers by combining Rome2rio’s end-to-end journey planning supply with the in depth transport stock that’s bookable by way of Omio, it provides.

Commenting in a press release, Naren Shaam, CEO and founding father of Omio, stated: “We’re excited to welcome the Rome2rio workforce to Omio. They’ve constructed an excellent product with revolutionary tech and delivered spectacular progress. Collectively, our two manufacturers will attain half a billion customers yearly and supply entry to hundreds of transportation operators globally, serving to us ship our imaginative and prescient to unravel shopper journey globally.”

“Becoming a member of forces with Omio is a pure extension of our current product expertise,” added Dr Michael Cameron, CEO and co-founder of Rome2rio, in one other assertion. “We have now spent nearly a decade refining our capability to assist customers determine how one can get from one nook of the globe to a different. Now, with Omio, Rome2rio clients will be capable of e-book tickets with extra transport suppliers than ever earlier than, and obtain assist all through their journey.

“Rome2rio and Omio share a imaginative and prescient of making easy, intuitive multi-modal transport merchandise for our customers. As a workforce, we’re excited concerning the alternative to work with Omio, combine our applied sciences, and leverage one another’s experience to scale much more shortly.”

Additional acquisitions look to be on the playing cards for Omio, which says it can look to purchase its manner into new geographies — in addition to in search of to develop organically and by way of partnering with extra transport suppliers.

At the moment the 2013-founded journey enterprise has a median of 27 million month-to-month customers. It additionally says it has 18 million app downloads up to now in addition to greater than 800 partnerships with transportation suppliers.

The post Omio buys Rome2Rio to build out its global travel aggregator business – TechCrunch appeared first on Tripstations.

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patentanwalt-reinert · 5 years

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+++ Mit dem GoEuro gibt es seit wenigen Monaten ein weiteres (seltenes) Einhorn in Berlin. Kurz nach der Verkündung der 150-Millionenrunde ändert das Grownup, das zuletzt 300 Mitarbeiter beschäftigte, nun überraschend seinen Namen. Ab sofort ist die Plattform für die Buchung von Bahn-, Bus- und Flugreisen unter dem Namen Omio unterwegs. “Unsere geschäftlichen Ambitionen gehen weit über Europa hinaus”, sagt Gründer Naren Shaam zur Umbenennung. “Ein weltweit funktionierendes Buchungssystem für Transportdienstleistungen in einem einzigen Dienst existiert noch nicht und wir wollen die Ersten sein, die ein Produkt dieser Art anbieten”. Das doppelte “O” in Omio soll dabei “sowohl für den Anfang als auch für das Ziel einer Reise stehen”. Zudem soll Omio “an den ursprünglichen Namen GoEuro erinnern”. Funktioniert für uns aber nur bedingt. Startup-Jobs: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Herausforderung? In der unserer Jobbörse findet Ihr Stellenanzeigen von Startups und Unternehmen. Foto (oben): GoEuro

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toomanysinks · 5 years

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GoEuro rebrands as Omio to take its travel aggregator business global

European multimodal travel booking platform GoEuro has announced a change of name and destination: Its new ambition is to go global, scaling beyond its regional grounding to tackle the challenge of intercity travel internationally — hence needing a more expansive brand name.

The name it’s chosen is Omio, pronounced with the stress on the ‘me’ sound in the middle of the word.

GoEuro unveiled a new brand identity late last year — which it says now was preparing the ground for this full rebranding.

So why Omio? CEO and founder Naren Shaam tells TechCrunch the new name was chosen to be memorable, lighthearted and neutral. A word that travels inoffensively across languages was also clearly essential.

“It took a while — probably eight months — to do the search on the name,” he says. “The hard thing about the name is a few criteria we had. One was that it had to be short, easy to remember, and four letter names are just non-existent now.

“It had to be lighthearted because travel inherently comes with a lot of stress to consumers… Every time you book travel it’s a lot of anxiety and then relief after you book it etc. So we want to change that behavior to customers; saying we will take care of your journey.”

The multimodal travel startup, which was founded back in 2012, also says it’s happy to have been able to retain a ghost of its old brand — thanks to the double ‘o’ in both names — which it intends to suggestively stand in for the beginning and end of a journey.

In Europe the travel aggregator tool that’s been known since launch as GoEuro — and soon, within a matter of weeks, Omio, everywhere it operates — has some 27 million monthly users tapping into the convenience of a platform that knits together train travel, bus trips, flights and most recently ferries to offer the most comprehensive coverage available of longer distance travel options in the region.

Europe is heavily networked for transport, with multiple intercity travel options to choose from. But it is also massively fragmented across a huge mix of providers (and languages) making it challenging for travellers to navigate, compare and book across so many potential options.

Taming this complexity via a multimodal search and comparison tool that now also integrates booking for most ground-based travel options (and some flights) on one platform has been GoEuro’s mission to-date. And now it’s Omio’s tackle globally.

“Global transport is not on a single product. What we bring is way more than just air, in terms of all ground transportation,” says Shaam. “So for me the problem of how do I get from Kyoto to Tokyo, or Rio to Sao Paulo. Or somewhere in Southeast Asia in Thailand is still a global problem. And it’s not yet solved. And so for us it’s the right time to evolve the brand… It’s definitely time to step out and say we want to build a global brand. We want to be that transport product across the world where we can serve all transport globally.”

While GoEuro is in some senses a quintessentially European business — Shaam says he “couldn’t have imagined” building a multimodal transport platform out of the US, for instance, where travel is so dominated by airlines and cars — he suggests that sets the business up to tackle similar complexity elsewhere.

Putting in the hard graft of negotiating partnerships and nailing technical integrations with multiple transport providers, large and tiny, also isn’t the sort of tech business prone to fast-following platform clones. So Omio suggests competition at a global scale will most likely be piecemeal, from multiple regional players.

“When I look beyond Europe the problem that I experienced in Europe in 2010 [which inspired me to set up GoEuro] is definitely a problem I experience still globally,” he says. “So when we can figure out how to bring 100,000 remote train and bus stations plugged into a uniform, normalized product and then give a single-click mobile ticket that works everywhere why not actually solve this problem globally?”

That translates into having “the engineering and the product and the means” to scale what GoEuro has done for travel in Europe internationally, moving to other continents with their own blend and mix of transport options and challenges.

Shaam notes that Omio employs more than 200 engineers within a company that has a staff of 300 — emphasizing also that the partnerships plus all the engineering that sits behind the aggregator’s front end take a lot of resource to maintain.

“I agree it is such a European startup. And it has served us well to get 27M monthly users traveling across Europe. Last year alone we served something like eight million unique routes. So the density of routes that we have is great. We already have global users; we have users from 100+ countries,” he says, adding: “If you look at Europe, European companies are starting to go on the global stage more and more now.

“You can see Spotify being one of the largest global tech companies coming out of Europe. You’ve seen some in the fintech space. Industries where there’s heavy fragmentation in Europe allow us to build global products because Europe is a great product market.”

GoEuro — now Omio — founder and CEO, Naren Shaam

On the international expansion horizon, Omio says its considering expanding into South America, Asia and the U.S. Although Shaam says no decisions have yet been taken as to the regions and markets it might move into first.

He also readily accepts the goal of building a global travel aggregator is a long term mission, with the partnerships, engineering and legacy technology integrations that will have to underpin the expansion all requiring time (and money) to work through.

There’s also no suggestion that Omio intends to offer a more lightweight transport proposition as a strategy to elbow its way into new markets, either.

“If we go into the U.S. the goal is not to just offer another airline product,” he says. “There’s enough websites out there that do exactly that. So we will offer something different. And our competition will also be regional companies that offer something similar in each market.”

In a year’s time, Shaam says he hopes to have further deepened the platform’s coverage and usage in Europe — noting there are more transport dots to connect in markets including Portugal, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, plus parts of Eastern Europe (as well as “very heavily fragmented” bus providers in Spain and Italy).

By then he says he also wants to have “a clear answer to what are the two next big continents we want to expand into and have people that are ready to do that”.

So connecting the dots of intercity travel is very evidently a far slower-paced business than heavily VC-backed innercity transport plays — which have attracted multiple billions in funding in very short order thanks to fast usage velocity and revenue growth vs GoEuro’s modest (by contrast) ~$300M.

Nonetheless Shaam is convinced the intercity opportunity is still “a big market”. Perhaps not as massive as micromobility, ride-hailing and so on but still big and relatively under-invested, as he sees it.

So how will GoEuro as Omio approach scaling a travel business that is, necessarily, so very grounded in fixed and non-uniform transport infrastructure? He suggests the business will be able to draw on what is already years of experience integrating with transport providers of various types and sizes to support the new global push.

It’s developed what he describes as an “a la carte” menu of products for different sized travel providers — arguing this established menu of tools will help scale into new markets in fresh geographies, even while conceding there are other aspects of the business that will not be so easily replicable.

“Over time we built a lot of tooling that adapts to the different types of suppliers. So, for example, if you’re a large state-owned operator… that has very different systems built for decades basically vs a tiny bus company that runs from Naples to Positano that nobody even knows the name of or no technology it stands on we have different products that we offer to each of them.

“We have all the tooling built out so it’s basically ‘plug and play’ for us to do. So this thing doesn’t change. That’s portable.”

What will be new for Omio is international product market fit, with Shaam saying, for example, that it won’t necessarily be able to rely on the same sort of network effects it sees in Europe that help drive usage.

He also notes mobile penetration rates will differ — again requiring a different approach to serving customer needs in new regions such as Latin America.

“It’s not quick,” he concedes. “That’s why we’d rather launch now because I can’t tell you that in three months we’ll have had four more continents covered, right. This is a long term play but we’ve raised enough capital to make sure we’re here for that long term journey.”

“We have a name that people know and we can build technology,” he adds, expanding on what Omio can bring to the table as it tries to sell its platform to travel providers everywhere. “We’ve worked with 800+ suppliers. So from a commercial standpoint, people know who we are and how much scale we can bring in terms of their fixed cost businesses — so we can sell a lot of tickets for all of them. We can bring international tourists from a global audience. And we can really fill up seats. So people know that you put your supply on our product and we instantly scale because the existing demand is just so large.”

The Berlin-based startup closed a $150M funding round last fall so it’s not short of immediate resources to support the new hires it’ll be looking to add to start building out its global roadmap.

Shaam also notes it brought in more Asian capital with its last round, which he says he hopes will help “with this globalization capital”. Most of the investors it added then are also geared towards longer term returns vs traditional VC, he adds.

Omio is not currently in the process of raising another funding round, according to Shaam, though he confirms it does plan to raise more in future as it works towards the global vision of a single platform to help travellers move all over the world.

“The amount of capital that’s gone into intercity transport is tiny compared to innercity transport,” he notes. “That means that if you’re still going after a global problem that we want to solve that means that we need to raise capital at some point in the future. For now we’re just very comfortable with what we have but it doesn’t mean that we’ll stop.”

One potential future market Omio is likely to approach only very cautiously is China.

A b2c partnership with local travel booking platform Qunar, which GoEuro inked back in 2017, to link Chinese consumers with European travel opportunities, means Omio has a commercial reason to be sensitive of any moves into that market.

The complexity and challenge of going into China as an outsider is of course another major reason to go slow.

“I want to say very carefully that China is a market we need a lot more time to understand before we go into, as I think there’s enough lessons learned from all the tech companies from the West,” says Shaam readily. “It’s not going to be a rushed decision. So in that case the partnership with have with Qunar — I don’t see any changes in the near term because going into China is a big step for us. And it’s not an easy decision anyway.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/14/goeuro-rebrands-as-omio-to-take-its-travel-aggregator-business-global/

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fmservers · 5 years

Text

GoEuro rebrands as Omio to take its travel aggregator business global

The name it’s chosen is Omio, pronounced with the stress on the ‘me’ sound in the middle of the word.

GoEuro unveiled a new brand identity late last year — which it says now was preparing the ground for this full rebranding.

GoEuro — now Omio — founder and CEO, Naren Shaam

There’s also no suggestion that Omio intends to offer a more lightweight transport proposition as a strategy to elbow its way into new markets, either.

By then he says he also wants to have “a clear answer to what are the two next big continents we want to expand into and have people that are ready to do that”.

“We have all the tooling built out so it’s basically ‘plug and play’ for us to do. So this thing doesn’t change. That’s portable.”

He also notes mobile penetration rates will differ — again requiring a different approach to serving customer needs in new regions such as Latin America.

The Berlin-based startup closed a $150M funding round last fall so it’s not short of immediate resources to support the new hires it’ll be looking to add to start building out its global roadmap.

One potential future market Omio is likely to approach only very cautiously is China.

The complexity and challenge of going into China as an outsider is of course another major reason to go slow.

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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