Uganda's Tripesa Raises Pre-SeedRound For Continental Expansion
Tripesa, a Ugandan tourism-tech startup has raised a pre-seed round that will help it scale its continental expansion, through a suitable product market.
Tripesa which was previously called RoundBob started as an online travel platform, but it was affected during the pandemic which forced tourism to shut down all over the world.
From RoundBob to Tripesa the tour-tech made a pretty good comeback by building an infrastructure and logistics to assist organizations in the African tourism ecosystem to experience online business transactions at a more affordable cost.
As revealed by sources, the startup’s co-founder, David Gonahasa, gave insight into the tourism-tech outfit, “With Tripesa, a business will get online, sell online, accept payments and manage basic operations,”. David co-founded the startup alongside Raymond Byaruhanga and Thomas Karugaba.
He further explained that “Through the platform as a service solution, businesses can build no-code websites, itineraries, and client proposals, access a multi-currency payment platform to allow them to accept digital payments online including cards and mobile money, and lastly manage basic business operations including bookings and marketing. With continuous development, a business using Tripesa will be able to run most elements of their business in one place.”
The tourism-tech has been equipped by Eric Osiakwan, who is an angel investor, and then in June, it was able to secure an untold amount of pre-seed funding from Future Africa, LTNT Investment and Consonance Investment Managers. This was as disclosed by journalists, the fund will also assist Tripesa to acquire a product market fit.
David went on to mention, “Tripesa is currently working on achieving product-market fit in Uganda and Kenya. The choice of these two markets is to try out cross-border functionality as Uganda and Kenya have a lot of cross-border travel with requirements to share information and payments. Post finding product-market fit, Tripesa intends to scale across the African continent.”
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Currently, Tripesa has over Two hundred and sixty smallscale businesses signed up on its platform, businesses mainly located in Uganda and Kenya. The platform consistently witnesses daily growth, with more interest in its website development feature.
The tourism industry in Africa is said to be worth about Thirty-Five Billion US dollars ($35 billion ) yearly and has the tendency to employ about Twenty-Four million (24 million) people, through its operation within multiple tour sectors.