Travel tech startup FinalPrice raises $4 million for its curated travel tips

Travel app FinalPrice, founded by Russian entrepreneurs, has raised $4 million from Almaz Capital, Sistema VC, and private investors.

The app charges a yearly a subscription fee of $99 for access to hotel, flight, and car rental deals with artificial intelligence features for curating recommendations. Its algorithm generates info on hotels based on reviews, net promoter score (NPS), prices, location, among other factors. User can also submit previous travel itineraries that the app will learn from.

The market is shifting more and more to subscription models, said founder Peter Kutis (pictured), which is now proliferating in the travel sector. Kutis previously founded the online travel agency OneTwoTrip.

“With the old-school approach, online travel agencies utilize a model where competition is brutal and price is the only factor,” he said. “A subscription approach to travel offers better prices and better loyalty. No more ‘spend more to save more,’ last minutes deals, or excluded taxes.”

The new funding will be used for product development and to boost its presence in the US market, where the travel market was worth £329 billion in 2015, with online bookings making up half of sales.

Almaz Capital general partner Pavel Bogdanov will be joining FinalPrice’s board of directors.

“This year we are expanding geography of our investments and mostly focusing on deep tech companies,” added Alexey Katkov, president of Sistema VC. “So FinalPrice is a three-in-one target for us: this is the US project that has its own deep technologies and disrupts traditional travel market via perspective subscription business model.”

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