Vienna-based travel app developer Ulmon has secured seed funding from Global Founders Capital, TechCrunch reported.
While the actual investment from the venture capital firm established last year by Rocket Internet's Oliver and Marc Samwer and Delivery Hero's Fabian Siegel was not provided, the report said the amount is less than $5 million. Ulmon's most popular products are the CityMaps2Go apps. It had been entirely bootstrapped until now, the report said.
Last year, there were 6 million downloads of Ulmon in both iOS and Android, with the downloads already reaching more than 10 million in just four years. Ulmon Co-Founder and COO Florian Kandler said their cash flow is positive. However, they decided to get financing in order to really hasten their growth. He told TechCrunch, "Seeing how our competitors have taken in funding, we were certain that we had much better chances to keep lead over competitors if we could do the same."
Described as "Europe's biggest travel startup you've never heard of," Kandler said the 6 million downloads they obtained last year were estimated to be four times more compared to its higher profile rival Lonely Planet and close to nine times more than that of venture-backed Triposo, the report said.
Initially established as a side project of "travel geeks," Ulmon now offers CityMaps2Go in both free and paid versions. While the free version limits the user to only five destinations, a fee of $2.99 gives users access to an unlimited number of maps and other travel data, the report said.
Aside from premium downloads, Ulmon also intends to get revenue from affiliate fees on the goods and services that customers will buy through the platform. It intends to build up this area with the proceeds from this round.
However, Ulmon does not intend to aggressively push advertisements to its users. Kandler said, "We are not forcing bookables in the face of users, and we have been very conservative, not aggressive. We have chosen to do all of this organically."
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