Travel start-up Pickyourtrail raises funding, forays into Dubai

Ganapathy, co-founder of the company, said they did a study and found Dubai to be an ideal market

City head-quartered travel company Pickyourtrail has raised an undisclosed funding from Kunal Shah (CEO, Cred), Adit Parekh (Ex Blume Ventures) and Vinay Ahuja (Executive Director, IIFL Wealth) and existing investors.

The funds acquired will be used to further gain market share in the leisure space and explore newer geographies. “We are expanding into Madurai and hiring people there. Delhi is the next market we are focussing on,” Hari Ganapathy, co-founder of Pickyourtrail said.

As part of its global expansion plans, Pickyourtrail also opened a new office in Dubai last week. “We did a study and found Dubai to be an ideal market. The eventual goal is to move into more markets,” Mr. Ganapathy said.

“Going global was always on the roadmap and our initial experiments through the first and second wave of the pandemic gave us an opportunity to test out the market. There is a clear gap for a reliable global holiday travel brand and we believe that our expertise in catering to one of the most value conscious customer segments (India) puts us in a unique position to build that brand with our market-leading tech. Markets like the USA have a $100B+ outbound travel scope and even a small share of that pie is a significant opportunity,” said Srinath, co-founder of Pickyourtrail.

Kumar Vembu, CEO, GoFrugal Technologies, who is also one of the early investors and mentors, said Pickyourtrail was the worst-hit travel brand in India. The pandemic was the time where many big names like CoxnKings, ThomasCook (UK), VirginAtlantic, to name a few, fell by the wayside.”

He added, “Pickyourtrail not only survived but also added multiple lines of business and invested the downtime in building their tech and product stack. With the macro conditions for travel getting better, I am confident of them growing exponentially over the next few years.”