Origin Secures Funding to Make Traveling Easier
Traveling is hard, and it shouldn’t be. This was the catalyst for launching Origin back in 2020 — Tamar and I wanted to make traveling easy while enjoying your experiences more. We researched the market, built prototypes, and recruited the dream team to crystalize our vision.
Just one year since joining forces, I’m excited to share that we have removed our waitlist and secured $5 million! The round is led by Project A with our long-time investor Cavalry Ventures to fuel our super-powered curators to deliver the best personal travel services in the market.
Origin was born out of a real need. We found ourselves at odds with little time to invest in building great trips for ourselves, friends, and family. There are great self-serve tools like Booking or Expedia to search for hotels, flights, and things to do. Unfortunately, the complexity of trip planning and managing is a time sink.
What about using traditional agencies? We tried them out and learned that the level of personalization through these services is underwhelming, while the only form of communication and services were the phone, email, or PDFs. Why can’t we funnel all of this through the most convenient form factor of an app on the phone?
With Tamar’s background in operations and marketing and mine in machine learning and AI, and experience with human-in-the-loop machine learning to superpower experts — we knew we could change the travel domain for the better.
So now that we have built a great foundation, what’s next? We will use the new funds to:
- Expand local knowledge and connections: Invest in people, data, and relationships to increase our destination coverage from 110 to 140 individual countries and offer an extra level of depth in each respective destination.
- Enhance the app: Continue to build the best travel app in the world, including accelerating the trip booking process through better tooling, adding on-trip functionalities to enhance the travel experience, and better-capturing feedback for future trips.
- Evolve our tools: Continue building internal functionality to superpower our curators. This way, they can design better experiences for you, faster.
- Build out partnerships: we will bring on new travel providers, hotels, etc., to increase access to undiscovered destinations.
- Accelerate content development: We will develop more diverse travel content to serve more unique interests of our members.
With this significant milestone, we are more amped than ever before to make traveling easy while delivering the best possible travel experiences to the world!
Onward!
Download the app or visit our website to join our journey
