People are discovering a taste for travel and adventure, but as they venture further afield more frequently they encounter the inevitable travel headaches; delays, cancellations, and connection difficulties that stop them in their tracks.
This has opened the door to a new generation of travel tech start-ups, like Go Euro, Route Happy and Hotel Tonight, aimed at making journeys and travel experiences as seamless as possible.
The entrepreneurs behind these ventures have invariably experienced travel frustrations of their own. In the case of Italian multimodal transportation start-up Waynaut, it was the daily commute from home to university of its founder and CEO Simone Lini that was the inspiration.
Back in 2011 the business administration student was making the 80-kilometre round trip between his home in Crema, to Bocconi University in Milan, every day.
He says: “None of my friends carpooled to the university. There were websites but they weren’t that great - you couldn’t even pay online for your ride – and I thought I could come up with something better.”
It gave rise to his first venture Easygoing. Teaming up with fellow students, designers Matteo Lo Manto and Fabian Niederkofler, on an entrepreneurship programme, a prototype was soon underway.
They entered a pitch competition and won a scholarship at an entrepreneurship school in San Francisco. The feedback was quick and brutally honest: Easygoing sucked. It wasn’t innovative and would be very hard to build.
Back home, Lini realised his error. The demand wasn’t just for carpooling. People needed to be able to get somewhere, several times, every day, using multiple transport options; carpooling, buses, trains, car sharing, bike sharing, the works.
However, while there was data online, there was no integrated solution to find out the best way to get where you wanted to go. Abandoning Easygoing, the team focused on devising a new solution, called Youmove.me.
All they needed now was the development expertise to build it. Another fortuitous journey then took Lini to Australia to work as an intern at venture incubator Rocket Internet, which he describes as an ‘amazing gym for execution’.
“You have a problem and it has to be solved yesterday,” he says.
While he was there he met someone from his hometown of Crema. Even better, Giorgio Patrini, had graduated from Politecnico, Italy’s top engineering university, in computer science. The two set about creating the first draft of Youmove.me architecture in a Melbourne hostel.
Lini eventually returned to Italy to launch Youmove.me, with the help of engineer and senior Java developer Michele Festini, and also changed the business model from B2C to B2B. Instead of competing with online travel agencies, the aim was to become their partners.
Having secured a seed round with venture capital fund P101, Youmove.me changed its name to Waynaut, and brought former private equity fund manager Matteo Elli on board as COO. The goal was to become the leading multimodal travel platform.
“Online travel agencies (OTAs) haven't changed much since the 2000's; you select the airports, you find the flights,” says Lini. “But they know that in order to stay competitive they have to innovate in a way that has an impact on their P&L. Multimodal transportation does that. Why pay a lot for
Subsequent funding rounds were always going to be a challenge.
Elli, who had worked for a ‘fund of funds’ that invested more than $500million in several PE and VC funds, says: “While the Italian VC environment is flourishing, it is still very difficult to raise huge amount of capital due to the small dimension of the funds and the fact that there are just a few of them.”
Both Lini and Elli insist that Italy is a good place to start a company, but that it is less so to scale a company.
“Valuations are low compared to London or San Francisco, but the same funding gets you a much longer runway,” says Lini. “However, because of high taxes, complex and inflexible labour laws, and the lack of funds after the Series A stage, I would say that an ambitious venture has a much higher chance to succeed abroad.”
For now Waynaut is focused on integrating technology solutions with a few leading players in the travel market and demonstrate the revenue-increasing capacity to other OTAs.
Plans to close a Series A this summer 2015 will put them on track for scaling their coverage Europe-wide.
“We are also working on our machine-learning based data acquisition technology that will allow us to semi-automatically gather information on every kind of means of transportation in the world, regardless of their language,” says Elli.
“Our long term vision is to have every available piece of information about transportation together, so that you can find the best way to get from Central Park, NY to Darling Harbour in Sydney and book the entire trip in just one click.”
