– The Spanish startup, developer of its own tourist content technology, closes its second round of investment worth 1.05 million dollars.
– The operation has been led by top-tier investors participating in companies such as Cabify, MásMóvil, Signaturit, Next, Pangea, Weplan and Mr Jeff.
Madrid, October 15th, 2018 – Smartvel, a Spanish startup provider of destination content solutions for the tourism sector, has closed its second round of investment worth 1.05 million dollars, which will allow the tech company to continue to advance through the fast-growing path that it has been maintaining thanks to its innovative technology based on Big Data, capable of collecting updated content from any destination in the world.
In addition to the support of Caixa Capital Risc and Alsa, companies that invested in earlier phases and that have increased their participation, the operation has involved reputed investors in the business world such as Fides Capital, Faraday Venture Partners or Pinama Inverstartups. First level international investors such as Max Burger, as well as other independent investors, have also participated.
“The most valuable thing in this round is the size of the investors. All of them with successful backgrounds in the consolidation of companies that have been able to change the dynamics of many industries. We are confident that thanks to them we can become a benchmark in content solutions in the tourism sector nationally and internationally” says Íñigo Valenzuela, CEO of Smartvel.
Smartvel’s technology, based on Big Data and Machine Learning techniques, is able to efficiently collect, classify, monitor, enrich, translate and geolocate all the events taking place at any destination in the world. With all this relevant content to the traveller, Smartvel has developed a series of easy to integrate solutions within the digital channels of its customers – leading players in the tourism sector such as Airlines, Tourism Offices, Hotel Chains or Travel Agencies – which allows them to display to the travellers all the content on what to do at their destinations, as a tool of inspiration and help in planning their stay. With this, they manage to add value to the customer experience throughout all the touchpoints of the customer journey, and contribute to an improvement in brand awareness and customer loyalty.
“At Smartvel, we want to help the main companies within the sector to improve their traveller’s experience, by providing value through content solutions that allow users to get inspiration and plan a trip in an intuitive way” Valenzuela assures. “We are facing a very dynamic panorama in the tourism sector due to the irruption of new technologies and the digital era. Companies need to bet on new technologies and services that add value during the entire cycle of the connected traveller, in order to differentiate themselves from the competition and retain their users ” he adds.
Smartvel, which recently acquired the British content marketing company Pearlshare, already has important clients such as Singapore Airlines, Iberia, the City of Buenos Aires, Iberostar Hotels, Nautalia, Mahou, Grupo Globalia, among others, and is in full international growth. This new round will provide a boost on its resources that will enable the startup to continue investing in its internationalization during the coming years, as well as to continue improving the technology and product.
The opinion of the investors
Caixa Capital Risc, the venture capital manager of CriteriaCaixa, with more than 175 investments in recent years and currently managing 195 million euros, comments: “We expanded our position in Smartvel due to the strong international traction demonstrated, as well as the business expectations and the technological component of the solution created.” ALSA comments that “ALSA’s trust in this project is motivated by our Innovation Strategy, which is betting, among other things, on the participation in Startups such as Smartvel with high growth potential”.
FIDES Capital, that belongs to the Perennius Group comments “In Smartvel we identify a great team leading a very solid technological project with a growing business model, as well as a great international projection”.
Faraday Venture Partners “We are delighted to have Smartvel within our investment portfolio due to its growth in metrics until today, as well as the state of maturity of the company and the team that leads it.”
About Smartvel
Smartvel is a Spanish startup that uses Artificial Intelligence with Big Data and Machine Learning techniques to collect, classify, monitor, enrich, translate and efficiently geolocate all the events taking place at any destination in the world. This way, Smartvel is able to gather the unstructured content of the network and turn it into a solution of ordered contents that incorporates the up-to-date events of the cities (concerts, culture, sports competitions, congresses, etc.) and the static content (museums, restaurants, representative buildings, among others). The result is a constant updated solution on what is happening at the destination available to the traveler. Smartvel helps companies in the tourism and travel sector to digitally transform their current and potential touchpoints, using destination content to add value to every user interaction throughout the customer’s journey. More information at https://www.smartvel.com
