Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), a Kenya-based venture studio focused on tourism, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to build a generation of startups that use technology to modernize the tourism sector.
Investors participating in this round include Clistar Credit Corporation, Canadian Investment Corporation, The Untours Foundation, and a number of angel backers including Playfair Capital founder Fede Pirzio-Biroli, former CEO of lastminute.com and M-Kopa board member Ian McCaig; Anthony Rock, president of Rock Impact Capital; Rich Hoopes, Managing Director of Impact Capital; Jim Villanueva, Managing Director of Global Partnership Social Venture Fund, and Helena Rice Harstad, Co-Founder and Chair of the Optimizer Foundation.
The Venture Studio plans to build around four startups each year at the intersection of tourism, climate and technology.
“I think what’s exciting for the team is all the possibilities of digitizing green tourism in the future. And one of the perks of working in a studio is always playing around with new creative ideas. We have ideation sessions where we have very structured discussions around exploring tourism industries that can help reduce the carbon footprint of the African tourism industry,” said CEO Ben Peterson. With Mikul Shah and Jan van der Dos de Willebos in early 2020 – before covid hits.
Despite the uncertainty in the tourism sector due to the Covid pandemic, the PEV Group has not slowed down, but instead launched two startups – Elephant Bookings, a Software as a Service (SaaS) product and Nomad.Africa, a content-to-business magazine.
Elephant Booking is a B2B product that brings hospitality providers online and helps them increase occupancy by allowing direct bookings. Nomad.Africa was originally founded by Shah, who is also the founder of restaurant discovery site EatOut Africa. Venture Studio is currently seeking co-founders and CEOs for its two startups.
But why the focus on tourism?
“There are thousands of startups in agriculture, fintech, energy and health – all major sectors of the African economy, but very few in tourism, and only a few have raised capital. Even though tourism is one of the largest sectors on the continent,” said Petersen in Africa. Primary V.C. The former senior partner of AHL Venture Partners said
It seemed very strange to me, so I began to investigate why and at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that this is a big industry, but it is completely stuck in the 1970s. The way it works. Most tourism organizations do not have any online presence. You can’t even go to the most expensive safari lodges’ websites and book a room. You have to send an email or call an agent and it takes several steps to make a reservation,” he says, adding that Elephant Reservations is the first solution to the gap in the market for PEV.
Perterson’s further investigation revealed to PEV that the industry in Africa was ripe for disruption, especially as the sector is the fastest growing in the world.
“I realized there was a problem with modernizing this industry and we started to look a little further. And I quickly realized that there wasn’t just one business opportunity to modernize the tourism sector. There were dozens of possible ways to do this. “
Over the next decade, Africa’s tourism sector is expected to grow by 6.8 percent, double the continent’s overall economy, as the industry recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic. According to data from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), 14 million new jobs will be created during that period.
