Culture Trip secures funding for ‘new phase of hyper-growth’
Fast-growing start-up Culture Trip has secured $80 million in funding to ‘propel the business forward’ and enter a ‘new phase of hyper-growth’.
The announcement comes after the company revealed plans to launch an online travel agency division later this year, connecting boutique hotels, independent hotels, hostels and experience providers with its ‘rapidly rising’ millennial customer base.
Led by PPF Group, the new funding is being used to immediately beef up its executive team with key people joining from leading tech companies.
Mike Fox joins from Facebook to become chief marketing officer. He was part of the early team responsible for growing Facebook’s annual advertising business.
Chief risk officer, Dick Soule, has been appointed to expand and diversify Culture Trip’s monetisation efforts.
Soule was the first head of global sales at YouTube, playing a key role in developing and driving their sponsorship and media programme, and worked more recently for Samsung and Jaunt.
They will work alongside Nick Jakobi, chief product officer, who joined Culture Trip after working at Facebook and Google.
"I’m thrilled to have such world-class tech talent on our growing executive team and Board," said Dr. Kris Naudts, Culture Trip founder and CEO.
"With this investment and quality of leadership, Culture Trip is now ready to enter a new phase of hyper-growth."
Culture Trip said the ‘game-changing investment’ will also help finance a product redesign, launching today, and will help it to expand its global engineering and creative workforce to ‘fuel innovation, drive further audience growth and roll out various monetisation strategies’.
Ladislav Chvatal, chief officer for strategic projects of PPF Group, said it saw huge potential for Culture Trip to ‘truly revolutionise the media and travel industries’.
Culture Trip has offices in New York and London and a research and development team in Tel Aviv.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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