When you book a trip, you start with a search field. You type in a city and some dates. That assumes you have already made up your mind.
"The travel industry has been addicted to search. Kayak, Momondo, all of these platforms – it's all about you as a user knowing exactly where you want to go," says André Rangel de Sousa, CEO and co-founder of Tryp.com.
"And this is not where we see the consumer space moving. TikTok, YouTube – it's all about recommendations. That's what we're bringing into travel."
The idea came to him while he was on a summer course in China as part of his degree at SDU in Odense, travelling around Asia with his now wife.
"We didn't really care where we would end up. We just wanted a good trip – it doesn't really matter if it's somewhere in Thailand or Vietnam. So I thought it would be really cool to have a computer engine find these combinations, try different things out, and figure out what are winning trips for consumers."
80 million tickets checked almost every second. Tryp.com tracks prices on flights, trains, buses and ferries in real time. Around 80 million tickets, monitored almost every second.
"We create unique combinations with these tickets with our AI model. If we find a good flight, we stitch it with a train ticket, with a bus ticket, and that will make a unique combo," André explains.
"And if that combo is likely to interest you as a user, that's something our engine is going to send you."
Between half a million and a million people now use the platform every month.
"It's a product that actually gives people unique experiences. They are travelling to places and doing things that they wouldn't be doing in a search environment."
A match, not a stake
In 2021 the founders quit their jobs and went all in. They went to TechBBQ looking for investors.
"One of our first investors introduced us to EIFO. That was just a great thing, because back then we were a very, very small company."
"We didn't want to have too much investment from equity, because that would dilute the founders. So when our investor told us about EIFO and the match loan, it made perfect sense for us."
The first round came to EUR 250,000 – from angel investors, EIFO and the Innovation Fund. It was the money that moved Tryp.com from student project to company.
"Before that we were just a student exercise. We had the engine, we had the technology, but we had never been out there selling to consumers. That was the first time we could really be out there, do advertising, hire people. That was the real start of the whole thing."
The pattern has repeated since. In 2023 the company raised a round with its first VC, a German venture fund, and EIFO came in again with a match loan alongside one of the angel investors.
