Travelmenu.ru, a site offering a suite of travel products including hotels, flights, and vacation packages, announced yesterday that it has raised $1.6 million in growth capital from Almaz Capital Partners and Runa Capital, two important venture capital firms in Russia.
The funds will be used “to invest in a direct-to-consumer marketing campaign and build additional sales infrastructure,” the startup announced.
Travelmenu works with 70 package tour operators and offers direct booking access to over 277,000 hotels and 500 airlines globally. The site is also working to integrate offers from low-cost airlines, but “low cost companies require direct consumer payment by credit card; before launching that product, we need to extend payment methods,” CEO Nina Pogossova told East-West Digital News.
On a young and fast-growing but already competitive market, the startup claims to be the only one offering such a comprehensive suite of travel products. “Having focused on product aggregation for the last two years, we are now ready to offer the Russian and Ukrainian traveler the widest choice of hotels and package holidays online at the lowest possible price,” says the company.
The startup launched in early 2009 as a hotel booking engine for travel agents in Russia and Ukraine. It has been funded until now by some of its founders, Pogossova told EWDN.
The founding team includes Nina Pogossova, Mikhail Pogossov, Katrin Buckenmaier, and Oleg Kopachevts. Buckenmaier and Pogossova are Harvard Business School graduates.
Almaz Capital Partners, informally called the Almaz-Cisco fund, is one of the best-established Russian venture funds. Among its portfolio companies are Alawar, a developer, publisher, and distributor of casual games, and Parallels, an internationally renowned publisher of virtualization and automatization software. Almaz also has a stake in Yandex, the Russian search company that just began trading on NASDAQ. In January 2011, Almaz sold to Skype its stake in Qik, which developed a mobile video file sharing application.
Early stage fund Runa Capital was founded in mid-2010 by Sergey Belousov, chairman of Parallels’ Board of Directors, and Alexander Galitsky, head of Almaz. The fund, which manages nearly $60 million in capital and share assets, invested last month in Metabar, a Russian startup offering customizable toolbars.
