Edinburgh-based travel tech startup TravelNest has raised £3 million in seed funding from Pentech, Mangrove Capital Partners, Frontline Ventures, and former Skyscanner COO Mark Logan.
TravelNest is a central platform for holiday rental hosts to manage all of their advertising in one place, providing a dashboard on the ads’ data and the property’s performance. The platform is free with TravelNest earning revenue via commissions from ads booked through the platform.
The vacation rental market is tipped to be worth $193 billion, said the company, driven by the likes of Airbnb and Booking.com. However, the landscape is rather fragmented with hosts needing to manage several different avenues for advertising and renting their properties.
“This is a real headache for holiday rental hosts. Every property is unique and there’s hundreds of advertising and listing options, all of which offer something different,” said Doug Stephenson, CEO of TravelNest (pictured).
“It’s very difficult to gauge what advertising equates to in terms of performance for each site and the task of boosting site rankings is very complex,” he said.
“This is a massive market but while the B2C side of the sector is well developed, the B2B side has so far been almost entirely overlooked.”
The new capital will be invested in growing its engineering team and further product development. The bulk (90%) of the company’s business is the UK with a view to expanding internationally.
“We see a very large opportunity to create value by intelligently matching supply and demand,” added Stephenson. “With this experienced group of investors we have support for the long run but our focus right now is on product development.”
Mark Logan and Craig Anderson, partner at Pentech, will join the board of TravelNest.
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