Purple Elephant Ventures, Kenya’s tourism-focused startup studio, raises $1M pre-seed funding

The next generation of startups that use technology to modernize the tourism sector has received $1 million in pre-seed funding.

The Untours Foundation, Klister Credit Corp., and a number of angel backers are participating in the round.

Every year, the studio will build about four startup at the intersection of tourism, climate and technology.

Kenya’s HotelOnline acquires hospitality software company HotelPlus

The team is excited about all of the possibilities to transform tourism into a more sustainable industry. Working in a studio allows us to experiment with new ideas all the time. We have sessions where we look at the tourism industry from the point of view of building businesses that will help reduce the carbon footprint of Africa's tourism industry.

Despite the uncertainty in the tourism sector from the Covid pandemic, the PEV team didn't slow down but instead went on to launch two startups.

Elephant Bookings is a B2B product that helps hotels increase theirOccupancy rates by allowing direct booking Shah is the founder of Eat Out Africa. The studio is looking for co- founders and CEOs.

The focus is on tourism.

There are thousands of startup in agriculture, FinTech, energy, and health, all of the major sectors of the African economy, but very few in tourism, and only a few have raised capital. "Despite the fact that tourism is one of the largest sectors on the continent, this is still happening."

It sort of struck me as odd, so I started looking into why that is the case, and at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that it is a massive industry with real margins but it is stuck in the 70s. Most tourism organizations don't have a website. You can't book a room at the most expensive lodges on the website. He said that Elephant Bookings is the solution to the first gap PEV saw in the market.

Perterson told PEV that the industry in Africa was ripe for disruption because of the sector's rapid growth.

There is an issue with modernization of this industry and we started to look at it further. I came to the conclusion that there was more than one opportunity to improve the tourism sector. There were many possible ways to do it.

The African tourism sector is expected to grow at a double-digit rate over the next ten years, as the industry makes a strong recovery from the effects of the covid epidemic. According to the WTTC, 14 million new jobs will be created during that period.

Bookaway books $35M to scale up its ground transportation booking platform