Singapore-based travel startup, GoZayaan, has now entered Pakistan by acquiring the adventure tourism portal, FindMyAdventure.
Sources claim GoZayaan invested more than $3.5 million in the company. The deal is backed by GoZayaan’s existing investors, including Nordstar Partners, DST Global Partner Fund, and Alexander Rittweger. Last year, GoZayaan closed a $2.6 million seed round, led by Wavemaker Partners and joined by SEA-focused VCs, namely Ratio Venture, 1982 Ventures, Iterative, Century Oak Capital along with current and former Airbnb Executives.
GoZayaan, a South Asian Online Travel Agency (OTA), currently focused in Bangladesh, is working to make travel more convenient by creating an end-to-end holistic online travel booking solution for flight, hotel, inter-city bus, and tour booking.
The core reason behind this acquisition is the similarity between Bangladesh and Pakistan in terms of geography, user behavior, internet penetration, and digital travel booking. The startup aims to ensure the best travel experience for all its customers who are at the forefront of everything.
Komail Naqvi, founder of FindMyAdventure, commented:
We’re very excited to take this partnership forward. Our vision with FMA is aligned with GoZayaan but on a much broader level. For us, this is now a regional problem that we’re focused on solving together as one team. We’re now backed with the best investors around the globe and their collective interest in the Pakistani travel market shows that we still have a lot of work to do.
Ridwan Hafiz, founder of GoZayaan, also said
Entering the Pakistan market is the first step towards GoZayaan’s grand vision of expanding and strengthening the digitally-enabled travel ecosystem across South Asia.
The merger is expected to enable a more engaging experience for GoZayaan’s consumers. GoZayaan will add more end-to-end automated functionality of offering both domestic and international flights and hotel bookings, together with its continued services of trips and tours, all available on one platform.
The joint venture of the companies will play a key role in shaping the future of travel across South Asia and will greatly improve the digital ecosystem of travel. The goal of making travel accessible perfectly aligns with this merger and the company is looking forward to spreading its footsteps on foreign land with bigger market penetration entailing a boom on the South Asian OTA market.
