Travel tech start-up Guiddoo has raised seed funding from a group of angel investors including Pawan Borle, Senior Vice-President at flydubai, the Dubai Government-owned budget carrier and Abrar Ahmad, partner at Travel Capitalist Ventures.
Angel investors like Vishal Shah, Nirmal Singh, Sanjay Shah and Ushik Gala also participated in the deal.
The Mumbai-based start-up offers a mobile app that provides audio and visual guide for over 300 monuments and tourist destinations around the world. Some of these include the Taj Mahal, Statue of Liberty in New York, The Colosseum in Rome, Eiffel Tower in Paris and Angkor Wat, a temple complex in Cambodia. The firm will use the money to create curated content for the top 25 tourist destinations globally. It will also build a solution for India, which will be available in multiple languages.
“We want to ensure that travellers get timely and trusted advice,” said Vineet Budki, founder of Guiddoo. He declined to reveal the amount raised in this round. An alumnus of Cornell University - Johnson Graduate School of Management, Budki founded the start-up two years ago along with Nidhi Varma who worked as a crew member with airlines like Emirates for over a decade. A passionate traveller, Varma has visited over 50 countries and 100 destinations across the world.
Budki said their app has over 100,000 downloads and the company adds about 1,000 new users a day. The firm also provides a plug and play solutions to online and offline travel operators and tourism boards, across the globe who want to engage with the customers during their leisure or business trip.
Experts say the tourism and hospitality industry has emerged as one of the largest segments under the services sector of the Indian economy. This has thrown up huge opportunities for entrepreneurs in the area of technology. The total market size of the tourism and hospitality industry in India stood at $117.7 billion in 2011 and is anticipated to touch $418.9 billion by 2022, according to data collated by the Government.
