Explore Life Traveling, a travel-tech startup, has raised a seed round of around $500,000, reported VCCircle. The investors who participated in the round were Mekin Maheshwari, former head of engineering and chief people officer at Flipkart; former Yahoo and Amazon executive Bharat Vijay; former Facebook and Zynga executive Krish Seshadri; and former Google executive and Infoworks founder Amar Arsikere.
Besides, a group of angel investors from Harvard Angels, Cisco, Intel, Qualcomm and Oracle also participated in the round.
According to the company, the new investment will be used to develop the platform, build the product, and hire more people.
The company is not into hotels, resorts or serviced apartments, but provides accommodation in residential apartments with the locals. The platform claims to have 2,000 listings on its platform and clocks 25-30 bookings per day.
Founded in 2015 by Vikram Kumar and Rahul Suri, the company is based out of US and India.
The company has been growing at a fast and has gone past the gross revenue 20 times since the past year and the number of paying customers rose eight times.
The leisure travel market in India, as of today, is about $80 billion annually and is set to grow to $150 billion by 2024, according to a report.
With the growth in travel market in the country, there has been a continuous investment in the sector.
Recently, MakeMyTrip raised $330 million funding round led by South African technology group Naspers and Chinese travel firm Ctrip.com.
In March this year, ixigo raised $15 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.
In February, Bangalore-based experiential travel startup Wandertrails Services Pvt. Ltd had raised $1 million in seed investment from Earlsfield Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm of entrepreneurs-turned-investors.
