Zurich-based travel startup Nezasa, which offers a “one-stop shop” to design and book your personalised travel itinerary, has closed an $800,000 second round of funding from an unnamed family office, various business angels and existing investors.
The company competes with traditional travel agencies and similar custom/personalised travel upstarts, such as Evaneos, and Trip.me. Evaneos recently closed a much larger Series B round of $6 million, led by XAnge Private Equity, with participation from previous investor ISAI.
Nezasa’s backers — or at least the ones being named — include Paul Sevinç and Myke Näf, the founders of the online scheduling service Doodle, which recently had an exit of sorts, and Gregory Gerhardt, founder of Amazee Labs and Amazee Metrics. Sevinç will join Nezasa’s board of directors.
The Swiss company previously raised $340,000 in August 2013, bringing total funding to just over $1.1 million.
Nezasa provides a platform for individual travellers, combining the type of service typically offered by an offline travel agency with the immediacy and transparent pricing afforded by an online travel site. Essentially, travellers tell Nezasa where they’d like to go and are offered suggested routes powered by the startup’s destination experts.
They can then fine-tune their travel itinerary, such as number of days and where they’d like to go and what they’d like to do, with Nezasa consolidating the whole booking process in terms of hotels, transfers, activities, etc.
In addition, Nezasa’s customers are supported by a local tour operator when they actually arrive, essentially blending the best of the offline and online travel worlds.
To that end, Nezasa CEO Manuel Hilty tells me the startup is currently targeting travellers from english speaking countries, but plans to roll out globally. Meanwhile, travel destinations offered currently span 7 Asian countries, with more of Asia to come, and Africa next, and finally Latin America.
He also says Nezasa recently joined forces with Austrian Airlines and is actively seeking similar partnerships to accelerate growth.