A Ukrainian company that promises to find tourists the best deals for their money, has been declared the best travel startup of the year. The company won up to $500,000 in equity investment during the Seedstars Summit 2015 in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 3.
The proprietary search engine on Tripmydream helps travelers select a vacation destination from a range of options the company’s researchers have collected data on. Users simply enter their requirements: vacation type, date and budget.
There are currently five possible vacation types on the website: sea, exotic, winter resorts, sightseeing, and spa & therms. Users can also search for vacation deals in a specific location.
The co-founders of the startup, Andrey Burenok and Taras Polishchuk started work on the project in 2013. The first public web-version of the service went online in May 2015.
Since then, up to 1,000 people, mostly from Ukraine and Russia, have used the service to buy plane tickets and book hotel rooms using the service.
The service continues to grow, and an updated version with a new user interface, functions and design is to be released in three to four months. “We are so dedicated and obsessed about the product that one of us sold his apartment to make this happen, while another two left their jobs and are fully dedicated to what we do,” said Burenok while presenting the project on stage at the Seedstars Summit 2015 on March 3.
As about 70 percent of users visit the website via mobile devices, so development of a mobile application is now a priority for the startup. The mobile app is expected to be released at the beginning of the summer of 2016.
Burenok says the unique content of the website, which was gathered by a team of 20 people over two years, is one of the things that puts his service ahead of the rest. “We combined travelers’ experience with data mining and put this into our new search engine,” he told the Kyiv Post on March 6.
The Seedstars Summit 2015 featured the best startups selected from over 3,000 applications from live pitching events in 54 countries. Tripmydream came out top among the 10 finalists in the travel startups category.
This story first appeared in The Kyiv Post.
