WeAreHolidays ropes in Urrshila Kerkar as a new investor
Kerkar led the Series B Round at WeAreHolidays where she has bought out the existing shareholders to gain a majority stake in the company in her personal capacity.
Kerkar is a Director on the board of Cox & Kings Ltd.
The company WAH Holidays Private Limited owns and operates a travel marketplace under the brand WeAreHolidays and a travel social app called BIA that helps travelers record their trips while travelling.
Founded in 2012, the company counts some of the most prominent angel investors on its cap table namely - Vijay Shekhar, Anupam Mittal, Rajesh Sawhney, Sachin Bhatia amongst many other members of Mumbai Angels and GSF. Alongside angels, the company also raised money from Blume Ventures as part of the seed round. In 2014, the company raised its Series A round from Matrix Partners India.
According to Urrshila Kerkar, “User generated content, peer reviews and traveler recommendations are exciting spaces to be in and WeAreHolidays has made rapid strides in capturing the aspirations of this segment. Real-time travel experiences help customers to make quick decisions and thereby offers a profitable ecosystem for WAH to operate in.”
The company in its new avatar will focus on the social aspect of travel and will re-launch a version of their app BIA on App Store and IOS. The app will help people record real trips while travelling and will serve as a one-stop concierge for travelers to search for information, upload vouchers and get shopping deals on their mobile.
As per the CEO Deepak Wadhwa, “Next phase of our growth is going to be centered around mobile. With affordable data plans available at holiday destinations, for most travelers, today mobile has become the default and only choice to manage their travel bookings, shop, click pictures and stay connected socially. Through BIA we intend to cover this lifecycle and give great user experiences while traveling. We are happy to have Urrshila Kerkar as part of our growth story.’’
As per Harkirat Singh (Co-Founder & Head of product), “The app is designed for great user experience. To name a few, the app has a unique feature of working in offline mode i.e. it continues to capture the trip even in case where there is a drop in network while traveling (say Ladakh in India or Black forests in Germany). We are happy with initial closed group results of the app and are excited about the full launch that will happen very soon.”
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