MakeMyTrip alumni founded and New Delhi based WeAreHolidays has raised a first round of funding led by Mumbai Angels with participation from Blume Venture Capital, Sachin Bhatia (Co-Founder, MakeMyTrip) and Rajesh Sawhney led GSF Superangels. The exact amount raised in this round has not been disclosed.
WeAreHolidays is developing an artificial intelligent holiday recommender platform targeted at the burgeoning customized holiday market and has been bootstrapped since March, 2011. The company is co-founded by the trio of Deepak Wadhwa, former head of Online Holidays for Nasdaq listed MakeMyTrip, Harkirat Singh, former Product Manager for Domestic Flights at MakeMyTrip and Mohit Piplani, who helped set up the India operations for Michael Page International.
They are joined by Prashant Ghildiyal, a former entrepreneur who earlier co-founded OmSakshar Technologies and CricketWeekly.in and an expert in areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence & algorithms. According to the CEO, Deepak Wadhwa, the money raised will be used for product development, holiday content and back end integrations. “We’ve spent the major part of our professional lives in close contact with the Indian leisure traveller and feel excited at the numerous possibilities to solve some widespread pain points faced by the consumer. We strongly feel technology can play a critical role to transform how travellers research, plan and buy their holidays,” said Deepak.
“We’ve been bootstrapping for over 2 years now by planning and selling customized holidays while focusing relentlessly on developing the recommender platform and curate original content. To better position ourselves more closely with holiday planning, we’re unveiling a new version of our site very soon,” added Deepak.
