Australian travel search technology startup Rome2Rio has raised $450,000 in funding from an unnamed online travel agency in Asia and Melbourne entrepreneurs Guy King and Bevan Clark (who founded and sold RetailMeNot).
In addition, the company has appointed one of its advisors to interim CEO, namely Viator founder and former CEO Rod Cuthbert.
Rome2Rio lets users input a starting point and a destination, and subsequently serves up multiple alternatives for the trip, scouring flights, trains, buses, ferries and driving routes in the process. See video below to see it in action.
The company was started by two former Microsoft engineers, Bernhard Tschirren and Michael Cameron.
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Rome2Rio initially offered multi-model travel search directly to consumers, but the company says it will henceforth focus on B2B partnerships. Says Cuthbert:
“There’s a good vibe about Rome2Rio within the industry, and a growing view that consumers will soon demand multi-modal search results, particularly for travel in Europe and other markets where air travel is often not the best option.
Those two things combine to provide an opening for Rome2Rio to deliver tools that allow any site to incorporate multi-modal search results into their own offerings”.
The startup plans to release a number of fresh version of its API as well as white-label and widget-based solutions in the next few months.
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