IDG Ventures backs Indian travel storyteller Tripoto

IDG Ventures, an early investor in Baidu, Ctrip, and Tencent, has just invested in Indian startup Tripoto, an online destination for travel stories and itineraries. The investment comes from IDG’s venture fund for India which has made a string of successful early bets, including Flipkart, Myntra, and Yatra.

For Tripoto, the latest funding is a pre-series A round. The amount is not being disclosed. Its seed round investor Outbox Ventures has also participated in this.

The Delhi-based startup, founded by Indian School of Business (ISB) alumni Michael Lyngdoh and Anirudh Gupta, crowd-sources travel experiences, itineraries, stories, pictures, maps, and reviews from avid travelers. Each itinerary is linked to the profile of the traveler who wrote it so that a reader can see if he or she could be like-minded.

Tiger Global-backed HolidayIQ too offers a platform to share travel stories and itineraries to help users discover holiday spots and plan trips. It claims to have a traffic of over 5 million monthly users and lists over 35,000 hotels. Founded by Hari Nair, former partner with KPMG India, HolidayIQ is also backed by Accel Partners.

But according to Karan Mohla, vice president of IDG Ventures India, “the segment of travel content and community is certainly ripe for disruption as it hasn’t seen true innovation in a few years.” That’s why IDG is betting on Tripoto. “We were highly impressed with Tripoto’s dominance and rapid growth. Their mobile app usage and engagement has witnessed phenomenal growth in the months since the launch,” Mohla says.

Tripoto’s co-founder Gupta tells Tech in Asia that currently, Tripoto’s mobile apps – both Android and iOS – have around 50,000 downloads. “We also have close to a million monthly users on web and mobile [combined],” he adds. The latest investment will come handy to grow this number. “Mobile is one of the key focus areas for us in 2015. We will continue to scale up our community and make it more useful for travelers. We are also looking to acquire the best talent on both the technology and creative teams,” says co-founder Michael Lyngdoh.

Launched early 2014, Tripoto had raised US$400,000 in a seed round of funding led by Outbox Ventures. Founders of Snapdeal Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, founder of MakeMyTrip and TrulyMadly Sachin Bhatia, and co-founder of LetsVenture Shanti Mohan also came in as angel investors.

See: Big data and machine learning liven up the Indian online travel space