Omio has secured US$100 million in investments from existing and new investors including Temasek, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, NEA, and Kleiner Perkins. The funding will allow Omio – formerly known as GoEuro – to pursue its vision of unifying global transport with end to end consumer experiences. The investments will be directed at fuelling continued organic growth and opportunistic merger activities while strengthening the product and service offering. Naren Shaam, chief executive of Omio, said: “Travel is an eternal need and I have no doubt in the comeback of the industry.“We have seen a very promising recovery of our business over the past weeks, based on the unique strength of our product which includes all modes of transport across multiple markets.“Especially in Germany and France, we are already above 50 per cent of our pre-COVID-19 bookings despite marginal marketing spend.
“However, consumer expectations are changing, and the industry will need to evolve to new standards and provide new products with a strong focus on sustainability.“We will use the fresh capital to drive this change.”Omio said it had already experienced a stronger bounce-back in travel bookings than expected. This has been driven by a clear change in consumer behaviour towards more ground transportation, combined with an accelerating shift towards app usage as consumers prefer to avoid kiosks and long queues
.Jan Kemper, managing director of Omio, said: “When the Covid-19 crisis hit the travel industry, our team made an incredible effort to switch from growth model into a manage-to-cash organization within weeks.“At the same time, we started discussions with existing and selected new investors to make sure that we can ramp up our financial head-room for the coming years.“Our strong network of financial partners has been key to our ability to manage through this challenging period and will help us quickly return into growth mode.“The funding underlines our investors’ confidence in our strategy and the long term potential of our diversified, asset-light business model.”
