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The travel platform, which has kept tight-lipped about the details of its products, is set to launch this autumn.
Travel industry start-up Duffel has secured a staggering $21.5m in funding in its latest Series A funding round.
Previous to this, Duffel benefitted from a previous funding round of $4.7m led by Blossom Capital. The start-up is also a 2018 alumni of Y-Combinator’s summer cohort.
Duffel has been reticent on the exact details of the product, instead alluding to lofty ambitions to bring to customers “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience end-to-end”. Little is known about what the fledgling start-up meant by this, though it is suspected it could be connected to the amount of former fintech talent the start-up has recruited.
This latest round of funding is a significant leap in terms of available assets to the firm. It is headed up by US venture capital giant Benchmark, which has also backed the likes of Snap, Twitter and Uber. Blossom Capital and Index Ventures also contributed to the pot. It is, according to data on Crunchbase, the third round of funding that Duffel has received.
“The travel industry is underpinned by archaic software and processes that are fundamentally prohibitive for the modern-day traveller,” said Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO of Duffel. “We are reinventing the under-wiring between online agents and the providers – airlines, hotels, transport operators – in much the same way that the payments world is changing for merchants because of tools like Adyen and Stripe.”
Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark, said: “We have been watching Duffel from a distance and we are incredibly excited by the possibility it has to create something valuable for customers and travel providers alike. Duffel is focused on providing a better booking experience by building a platform that is easy to use with deep functionality.”
The company plans to launch its platform this coming autumn.
