The top venture capitalists are on pace to participate in fewer deals to travel tech startups this year, compared to 2015.
So far this year through 9/13/16, the top two dozen VCs participated in only 5 travel tech funding rounds — deals that totaled $138M in aggregate.
By year-end, 2016 is on track to see fewer than 10 travel tech deals with smart money VCs involved. Last year we saw these 24 leading VCs involved in 18 deals, adding up to nearly $2B.
Smart money VC Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ participation in a $1.5B Series E deal to Airbnb largely accounted for last year’s peak in dollars from deals involving top VCs.
For more on how we selected our 24 smart money VCs, please see the explanation and full smart money list at the bottom of this post.
Annual Funding Trends
Travel tech deals involving smart money VCs totaled 21 in 2012, and bottomed out at 7 in 2014. Then last year, deals rose over 2x to 18 total, only to fall off again this year.
Airbnb has secured the three largest funding rounds in travel tech history, since 2012.
Those rounds include:
- A 2012, $200M Series C with participating smart money VCs that included: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Founders Fund, General Catalyst Partners, Greylock Partners, and Sequoia Capital.
- A 2014, $475M Series D with the participation of a16z and Sequoia Capital.
- And a 2015, $1.5B Series E with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The company Oyo Rooms has secured the only other $100M+ round with participation from smart money VCs in travel tech, since 2012. Oyo’s rounds include: a $100M Series C in 2015, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital, and a $100M Series D in 2016, also with participation from Lightspeed and Sequoia.
The five companies that have secured funding with smart money VC participation so far this year (in order of round amount) are: Oyo Rooms, Lola Travel Company, Rocketrip, TravelPerk, and Recharge.
Quarterly funding trends
Looking at the quarterly dollars and deals trend, we see that all 5 deals in 2016 with smart money VC participation took place in Q2’16. Since 2012, there have never been more than 6 deals a quarter in travel tech with smart VC participation.
Travel tech smart VC business social graph
We used our Business Social Graph tool to visualize how smart money VC investors and their portfolio companies in travel tech are interrelated. Co-investors in Airbnb include: Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greylock Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The company HotelTonight is also backed by smart money VCs that include: Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and First Round Capital.
Please click to enlarge – image includes investments from 1/1/2012 – 9/13/2016.
Note: To analyze smart money trends, we looked at the activity of 24 top VC firms, selected according to portfolio valuations and investment outcomes. Some of the investors are linked to relevant research briefs. Here’s our full list of 24 smart money investors:
- Sequoia Capital
- Benchmark Capital
- Accel Partners
- Greylock Partners
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Union Square Ventures
- First Round Capital
- Bessemer Venture Partners
- Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
- New Enterprise Associates
- Founders Fund
- Lightspeed Venture Partners
- Foundry Group
- Index Ventures
- Khosla Ventures
- Social Capital
- Emergence Capital Partners
- True Ventures
- Floodgate Fund
- General Catalyst Partners
- CRV
- Spark Capital
- Battery Ventures
- Redpoint Ventures
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