Type of site | Privately held company |
---|---|
Available in | 24 (adding languages) languages |
Founded | 2009 in Zurich, Switzerland |
Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Founder(s) |
|
Key people | Johannes Reck (CEO), Tao Tao (COO) |
Industry | Tourism |
Products | Online marketplace |
Employees | 700+ (Q1, 2023) [1] |
URL | www |
GetYourGuide is a Berlin-based startup [2] online marketplace for travel activities. [3] GetYourGuide sells tours and excursions, activities including cooking classes, and tickets to tourist attractions. [4] It offers more than 100,000 products worldwide from more than 20,000 supply partners. [5]
The idea for GetYourGuide was conceived in 2009 by co-founders Johannes Reck, Tao Tao, Martin Sieber, and Tobias Rein, who were classmates at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. [6] When traveling to Beijing, they found navigating a foreign city as tourists difficult. They developed a business plan for a peer-to-peer Internet platform that connected tourists with amateur guides. Later, the plan was expanded and refined to an internet booking platform for professional tours and activities. [7] [8]
The company was then founded in 2009 in Zurich by the four students. [9] Initially, the company was funded by friends and family members. [10] The founders moved from Zurich to Berlin in 2013 to raise venture capital, but ended up getting a lot of their funding from American investors. [10] GetYourGuide raised US$170 million in funding over four funding rounds from 2009 to 2017. [11] [12] [13] Another $484 million was raised in a 2019 Series E round, valuing the company at $1 billion. [14] This was one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a European startup. [14] Then, in June 2023, GetYourGuide raised $194 million in venture capital, valuing the business at about $2 billion. [15]
In April 2013, GetYourGuide acquired Gidsy, which had also been developing mobile apps and had a team of 12 developers. [16] As a spin-off of ETH, GetYourGuide was initially headquartered in Zurich. The new company relocated its headquarters in 2012 to Berlin. An office in Zurich was maintained primarily for engineering teams.[ citation needed ] In October 2017, GetYourGuide opened a new engineering office in Zurich. [17]
In November 2017, GetYourGuide announced a $75 million Series D funding round raised to help support expansion in Asia and the Americas. [18]
By 2017, GetYourGuide was not yet profitable, but was rapidly growing. It sold 5 million tickets that year, compared to 5 million since it was founded in 2008. [19] This grew to 25 million total tickets sold by 2019. [20] During parts of the COVID-19 pandemic GetYourGuide shut down activity booking. [21] [22] After travel restrictions were lifted, activity on the site rebounded [21] [22] GetYourGuide started selling activities in the United States in 2021. [23]
In April 2019, GetYourGuide raised a $484 million investment from SoftBank Group. This infusion of capital raised its valuation above the $1 billion mark, making it a unicorn. [24]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted to remote work. [25]
Experience/tour providers list their service on the platform and the provider is charged a commission on the sales. [2] An online customer review system enables potential customers to assess the quality of tour providers. Additionally, GetYourGuide removes providers who consistently get bad reviews from its inventory. [7] In August 2018, GetYourGuide began selling tours under its own brand name. The company mined its data on customer preferences from having sold 15 million tours since its founding nearly a decade ago. From that information, it developed standardized criteria for how to best run a tour. To be labeled a GetYourGuide tour, an operator must agree to follow its best practices regarding meeting points, check-in processes, starting times, duration, and other factors. In return, the retailer will send more customers the operator's way. [26]
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on seed stage, early stage investments and growth stage investments in the enterprise, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors. Lightspeed has eleven offices globally and as of 2023 had approximately US$25 billion in assets under management.
Bain Capital Ventures LLC is the venture capital division within Bain Capital, which has approximately $160 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm's early-stage investments have included Attentive, Bloomreach, Billtrust, Docusign, Flywire, LinkedIn, Justworks, Turbonomic, Rent the Runway, Twilio, Rapid7, and Redis. Bain Capital Ventures manages $10 billion of committed capital, has over 400 active portfolio companies, and has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Balderton Capital is a venture capital firm based in London, UK, that invests in early-stage, technology and internet startup companies in Europe. It is considered to be among the four-biggest venture capital firms in the English capital.
WeTransfer B.V. is a Dutch internet-based computer file transfer service company that was founded in 2009 and based in Amsterdam. In 2024, the company was acquired by Bending Spoons.
WalkMe Ltd. is an American multinational software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, with headquarters in San Francisco, California. Its digital adoption platform (DAP) was recognized in Everest Group's PEAK Matrix Assessment of DAP vendors as the leading DAP product. Alongside its headquarters in San Francisco, the company has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina; Tel Aviv, Israel, and a global footprint including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan.
This is a timeline of Airbnb, a company that brokers private lodging rentals through its website.
The following is a timeline of the history of the photo messaging software Snapchat.
Mixpanel is an event analytics service company that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications.
Bolt is an Estonian mobility company that offers ride-hailing, micromobility rental, food and grocery delivery, and carsharing services. The company is headquartered in Tallinn and operates in over 500 cities in more than 45 countries in Europe, Africa, Western Asia and Latin America. The company has more than 150 million customers and more than 3 million driver and courier partners. The company has plans for an initial public offering in 2025.
Airtable is an American cloud collaboration service company headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas.
This is a timeline of online work-focused networking service LinkedIn.
Alejandro Carlos "Alec" Oxenford is an Argentine entrepreneur. He co-founded OLX, and co-founded letgo, a mobile classified ad app in the United States.
GoBrands, Inc., doing business as Gopuff, is an American consumer goods and food delivery company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company operates in more than 650 US cities through approximately 500 microfulfillment centers as of October 2021. It also operates in the United Kingdom, following a takeover of Newcastle upon Tyne-based Fancy. As of July 2021, the company was valued at $15 billion.
Monday.com Ltd. is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create their own applications and project management software. The product was launched in 2014 and in July 2019, the company raised $150 million, based on a $1.9 billion valuation. The company went public in June 2021 and is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Druva Inc. is a privately held software company. The company provides SaaS-based data protection and management products. The company was founded in 2008, raised several rounds of funding, and grew to more than 800 employees.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. Previously, he was a partner at Social Capital and an executive at Yahoo!, where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Prior, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and was the CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair. In December 2023, he became Tribe Capital's chairman and CIO.
Gorillas was a German ultrafast grocery delivery company which used dark stores between its founding in 2020 and its end in May 2024. Users could order grocery products through the Gorillas app.
Hopper, Inc. is a travel booking app and online travel marketplace that sells flights, hotels, rental cars, and short-term rentals. The company is headquartered in Montreal, Canada and Boston, Massachusetts.