GetYourGuide, a German online travel business, collected $194 million from investors in order to expand into the U.S., buy huge language models and other artificial intelligence technologies, and take advantage of the summer’s spike in demand for travel services.
The Berlin-based business said on Thursday that it had secured the money through a combination of stock and debt, with Blue Pool Capital, a U.S. asset management company, leading an equity investment of $85 million.
According to a person familiar with the situation, the investment values the firm at close to $2 billion, an increase over GetYourGuide’s last publicly reported valuation of $1.4 billion. In this round, previous investors KKR and Temasek made new investments.
BNP Paribas, Citibank, KfW, and UniCredit all provided support for the deal’s debt component. Just over $1 billion has been invested overall in GetYourGuide, including both stock and debt.
The product supplied by GetYourGuide is distinct from those of some other significant participants in the internet travel industry. GetYourGuide sells its consumers experiences and things to do in undiscovered locations rather than promoting hotels, flights, and other modes of transportation.
On its platform, these experiences are provided by independent vendors, and GetYourGuide receives a commission for each reservation made.
Following the lifting of Covid-19 limitations and the restart of regular cross-border transit, the firm has noticed a significant increase in demand for their platform.
GetYourGuide’s CEO and co-founder Johannes Reck claimed that during the early stages of the epidemic, the firm’s revenues were completely lost; for a number of successive quarters, the company had no income at all.