Written by Alex Bredeen
Journee secures £1.75m funding for its traveltech that builds experiential trips to mystery destinations
Journee, the online tour operator that matches people with experiential trips to mystery destinations, has secured £1.75 million investment. The seed round is led by ourselves and includes angel investment from Depop’s founder, Simon Beckerman, and CEO, Maria Raga.
What is Journee?
As the world opens back up and people’s appetite for international travel returns, Journee is helping the culturally curious discover unknown destinations. As well as its matchmaking capabilities, Journee uses its technology to manage the booking process end-to-end - from how to get there and where to stay to what to do when you arrive.
Journee was founded in 2019 by three friends and former Depop colleagues with a passion for travel - Ed Tribe, Megha Chaturvedi and James Gillard. The traveltech firm’s smart technology matches any person with their ideal trip using information gathered from a single questionnaire. Journee’s matchmaking technology is focussed on delivering convenience to the consumer - reducing the time consumers take to plan and book a trip from 10-30 hours to just 15 minutes.
What are Journee's future plans?
To date the traveltech firm has taken more than 1.5k bookings to over 52 mystery destinations and has a 4.9 rating on Trustpilot. With today’s investment and plans to grow their customer base and destination list, Journee wants to make it as easy as possible to book the adventure of a lifetime by delivering an experience better than anyone could book on their own.
Ed Tribe, Journee’s co-founder said “Our daily lives are so busy with too many things on our to-do-lists. The process of booking a trip can be tedious and by the time you’ve decided on the destination and found the flights and hotel, most people are out of steam. Planning exciting things to do while you are away falls to the wayside. We have created a way to make it unbelievably easy to book an adventure you never knew you needed. And as we want our travellers to embrace the unknown, we don’t tell them where they’re going until they get to the airport!”
Maria Raga, angel investor and CEO of Depop, added, “We were lucky to get to know Ed, Megha and James while they were at Depop and were impressed with their entrepreneurial spirit. They have a vision to make the world a better place by expanding people’s capacity to explore new cultures and have incredible travel experiences. I am excited to support the Journee team’s ambition to change how people travel.”
Journee is headquartered in London and has a remote team based in India. The traveltech firm has 15 staff in total and will continue adding to the team to support the customer growth that this new round of investment will bring.