Reports confirm that Pickyourtrail, a Chennai-based travel-technology start-up, has recently secured Rs 21 crore in a Series A round of funding led by the Founder of financial services firm iThought, Shyam Sekhar, and Kumar Vembu, Co-founder of Zoho Corp.
Further from the reports, this funding round also saw participation by CIO of investment advisory Entrust, Rajagopal Subramanian, and Girish Mathrubootham, Founder of Freshworks. The funds from this round would be deployed towards the expansion of Pickyourtrail’s marketing, technical team, scaling up of the proprietary technology platform of the company and towards product innovation.
Co-Founder of the company, Srinath Shankar, mentioned that the algorithms of Pickyourtrail across price matching, routing and personalization are industry first in terms of output and approach. The end goal is of making the company closely associated with customized international vacations and this funding round is a huge leap in that direction, he said.
In addition to enhancing its operations and technology capabilities, the start-up, which has apparently been acquiring clients organically, would be looking ahead to use this round for creating brand awareness. Shankar added that the margin of Pickyourtrail are in the double-digit range for complete offerings of travel planning, booking and execution, comparable to the industry averages.
Hari Ganapathy, Co-Founder of Pickyourtrail, said that the tourism and travel segment is witnessing a dynamic shift towards customized travel planning, mostly among young, millennial vacationers that have more money than time. He stated that customers of the startup typically include families and honeymooners, besides well-travelled solo vacationers.
Ganapathy added that Pickyourtrail currently covers more than 200 cities around the globe and only caters to vacations outside India. Proprietary algorithm of the company takes 40 factors into account, such as ratings, travel time, duration among other factors for building personalized itineraries for vacationers.
Kumar Vembu, from among the lead investors, stated that there is a huge opportunity in the experience economy, and he has partnered with Pickyourtrail to create a global vacation planning product.
