ExploreLifeTravelling is a US and Bengaluru – based travel tech start-up. The start-up announced on June 22 that it has raised seed funding from a clutch of angel investors. Mekin Maheshwari, former CPO at Flipkart, Bharat Vijay former CEO at Amazon and Yahoo, Krish Seshadri, former CEO at Facebook and Zynga and Amar Arsikere, former CEO at Infoworks and Google participated in the seed round of funding.

A clutch of angel investors called Harvard Angels, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm and Oracle also funded this seed round. CEO of ExploreLifeTravelling, Vikram Kumar said that the start-up managed to secure a little less than US $500,000 (Rs. 3.22 crores) in this round of funding. However, he did not reveal the exact amount the start-up managed to secure.

ExploreLifeTravelling has about 2000 listings on its mobile platform and claims to witness over 30 bookings a day. The fund from this round of investment will be used to develop the mobile platform, build the brand and hire more people.

“We only provide homes for accommodations. We want people to live with the locals and live the local way of life. In India, the concept of homestay is a semi-commercial venture. But in our case, it is not so. We are solving the trust issue, where people open up their houses”, said Kumar.

The start-up does not facilitate booking of hotels, resorts or serviced apartments for customers. ExploreLifeTravelling was co – founded in June 2015 by Vikram Kumar and Rohit Suri, who is currently the CTO at ExploreLifeTravelling. Kumar is an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin, US, and had previously worked as the tech lead at Cisco. Suri worked with Airespace, which was acquired by Cisco for US $500 million.

The start-up has a team of five members. It claims that its revenue has increased twenty – fold during the past year and that the number of customers using its mobile platform has increased eight – fold during the same period!

Travel tech start-ups are gaining traction in India. In the past year, quite a few travel tech startups got funded. They include the travel tech start-up Goomo Holdings Services India Private Limited which raised US $50 million (Rs. 321.6 crores) from the Mauritius -based private VC firm, Emerging India during June, this year (2017).

Source: Indian CEO