Cleartrip in talks with investors to raise $30 m in Series E funding

Online travel services provider Cleartrip.com is in talks with investors to raise its fifth round of Series E funding for $30 million to ramp up its mobile technology platform to attract a new segment of customers from around the country.

The company has raised $65 million in four rounds of funding since its inception in 2006 from Sherpalo Ventures, DAG Ventures, Gund Investment, Draper Fisher, Concur Technologies and Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. The new round of funding will involve both existing and new investors.

Betting on mobile biz “Our last round of Series D funding from Concur Technologies in 2011 has left us with enough of resources to run our business for the next few years. However, we need additional funding to invest ahead of the curve in mobile technology. This is because mobile transactions on our site are growing two per cent month-on-month and today contributes to 50 per cent of total transactions from 15 per cent a year ago, equalling that of desktops/laptops,” Samyukth Sridharan, President and COO, Cleartrip, told BusinessLine .

Stating that Cleartrip has achieved parity on user experience and features on mobile (smartphones) and desktops/laptops, he said: “We are now working on providing deeper functionalities to our 6.5 lakh active monthly users such as being able to offer choices like, being able to book a meal on the airline they have chosen to fly with on our site, choose a seat and many more such features.

“The idea is to accelerate the pace of new feature releases from once every 45 days that we doing now, to once every 15 days and use innovative technology at the supplier end of our business to make sure that the Cleartrip app is a part of everyone’s travel trip. And to do all of this we need funds to ramp up our 140-strong technology and for new customer acquisition.”

The Cleartrip app has crossed 4 million downloads across all platforms and continues to add half a million new downloads every month. The company clocked revenues of ₹800 crore for fiscal ended March 31, 2015.

Net neutrality “We withdrew from Internet.org, platform promoted by Facebook and Reliance Communications, in support of Net neutrality because we don’t want to be the only travel app that consumers have access to. We were thinking about pulling out three weeks ago, but made the decision to do it because of one customer tweet which said he was uninstalling the Cleartrip app because we were going against Net neutrality. We want our products and user experience to speak for itself,” said Sridharan.

However, he admitted that pulling out of Internet.org would result in a loss of first-time internet users, a huge customer segment from Tier-2 and -3 cities.. Mobile transactions for the company are largely driven by customers in Tier-2 and -3 cities and towns and the average ticket size is ₹6,000.

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