Johannes Reck, CEO of GetYourGuide.
get your guide
German online travel startup GetYourGuide has raised $194 million from investors as it looks to capitalize on a summer surge in demand for travel services, expand further into the U.S. and invest in large language models and other artificial intelligence tools.
The Berlin-based company said on Thursday it had raised funds through a combination of equity and debt, with an $85 million equity investment led by U.S. asset manager Blue Pool Capital.
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The investment values the company at nearly $2 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, up from GetYourGuide’s last public disclosure of a valuation of $1.4 billion. Existing investors KKR and Temasek reinvested in the round.
The debt portion of the deal was led by UniCredit, with support from BNP Paribas, Citibank and KfW. GetYourGuide’s total investment (equity and debt) is currently just over $1 billion.
GetYourGuide’s offering is different from that offered by some of the other major players in the online travel space. Instead of advertising hotels, flights, and other modes of transportation, GetYourGuide sells users experiences and things to do in untapped places.
These experiences are offered through third-party vendors on its platform, and GetYourGuide receives a commission for each booking.
As travel returned to normal as Covid-19 restrictions ended and normal cross-border shipping resumed, the company saw a significant increase in demand for its platform.
Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide’s chief executive and co-founder, said the company’s revenue was wiped out in the early days of the pandemic — the company had multiple quarters without any revenue, he said.
“We’re very frustrated in the pandemic,” Lake told CNBC. “The travel industry has been hit very hard within the travel industry. GetYourGuide is probably one of the hardest hit. Experiences are shut down. People aren’t going out.”
“There are some new shoots in 2021 as the U.S. reopens, but the real rebound will only start when the omicron proves to be a more benign variant and people start to resume travel by Easter 2022, and then we have Business has exploded,” he said.
Compared to 2019, GetYourGuide sales will double in 2022 and quadruple in the first quarter of 2023, Lake said, citing activity in 2020 and 2021 to be significantly below pre-pandemic baselines.
To offset the decline in physical experiences, GetYourGuide began offering users virtual tours and other experiences. More recently, it started offering its own exclusive brand experiences called “Originals.”
These include being able to turn on the lights of the Sistine Chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the pope’s official residence in Vatican City, and visiting New York’s Museum of Modern Art an hour before normal opening hours.
Lake believes the travel experiences market is worth $300 billion today, while he thinks the experience market more generally could be worth $1.5 trillion in total.
GetYourGuide will use the new funds to expand its operations in the United States, a huge source of growth for the company over the past year. The company also intends to invest more in AI and other product development, with a focus on using large language models, or LLMs.
LLMs are algorithms trained on large amounts of data, learning how to recognize, summarize, and generate text and other types of content. They power so-called generative AI systems, which allow users to generate new content by inputting specific prompts.
GetYourGuide says it has integrated LLM into its business to automatically generate descriptions of experiences, such as local pizza and pasta-making classes, and cruises on the Seine in Paris.
LLM can also help people discover new areas and find experiences through enhanced, personalized recommendations, Reck said. Google is rapidly advancing its work in artificial intelligence amid fears that the LL.M. will threaten its dominance in online search.