wetravel payments solution

The software development company WeTravel just raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by Left Lane Capital as software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies appear to have kept their appeal despite the current macroeconomic headwinds.

The company confirmed the news in a tweet and its Chief Executive officer, Johannes Koeppel, was interviewed by TechCrunch to provide further details about the business and what his company intends to do with this fresh funding.

WeTravel offers intuitive and easy-to-use software that makes life easier for travel agencies by allowing them to collect payments from customers and sell customized packages that they can assemble online without requiring the assistance of an agent.

Once the customer picks a package, the agency can collect the payment, set up a financing plan, manage cancelations, and add or eliminate certain items. The money collected can be either withdrawn to a bank account or agencies can use the WeTravel card to pay their vendors.

WeTravel Considers Itself “The PayPal of Travel”

This latest capital injection will allow the company to keep growing at a fast pace. Right now, over 3,000 businesses use WeTravel’s solutions to manage bookings and payments for more than 500,000 customers.

According to the firm’s CEO, revenues have multiplied by 3 compared to pre-COVID levels and he believes that the company will manage to double its top-line results in 2023 as well.

“The important piece is not so much about paying but what happens afterward”, Koeppel told TechCrunch. Companies in the tourism business typically have to deal with vendors in multiple countries and they have to manage the money they receive from customers by using spreadsheets or other similar tools.

WeTravel’s software has created a single interface that allows travel agents to keep track of the money they receive to make sure customers have been complying with the financing plan they proposed and that vendors have been paid to provide their services to passengers.

“A typical trip might cost $10 to the user, with the vast majority of that going to suppliers. It becomes about fund management. And more involved the trip, the larger the amount of suppliers from restaurants and transport companies to airlines and hotels and more”, the CEO commented.

WeTravel tapped on an ongoing industry shift that saw travel agents turn into “advisers”. This role involved a deeper connection with customers and a more thorough understanding of what they need and are looking for.

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The solution brought forward by the company allows agencies to stop investing time in developing these interfaces so they can focus on reaching out to leads and running their businesses.

As a result, Koeppel sees WeTravel as “the PayPal for travel” as the digital payments platform has not been able to offer a solution that is tailored to the needs of travel agencies and has instead adopted a more generalist approach to serve a larger audience.

SaaS Startups Pull Second-Largest Amount of Funding on Record in 2022

Other investors who participated in this latest Series B funding round include Swift Ventures, Base10, and Victor Jacobsson, an angel investor who was one of the founders of Klarna. The deal reportedly valued WeTravel at approximately $100 million.

Service-as-a-software (SaaS) companies have managed to attract capital this year despite the current macroeconomic headwinds, data from The Silicon Valley Bank suggests.

Thus far in 2022, companies in this segment of the tech industry have pulled $48 billion from venture capitalists and are projected to raise as much as $72 billion by year end. This would be the second largest amount ever raised since SVB has been keeping track of this market.

A Series B funding round is the second formal round of financing for a startup. It is typically completed once the business is already up-and-running and has demonstrated that it can continue to grow in the future.

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