One-stop app for travellers Tripoto bets big on personalization of user experience Tripoto enable users to crowd-source travel itineraries and share experiences.

The online travel community for travellers, Tripoto has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding led by 500 Startups, IDG Ventures and Advantedge fund. Other prominent angels like NeerajArora, VP, Watsapp and Leon Seynave also participated in this round. Prior to this, the venture had raised an undisclosed amount in Pre Series A round of funding from IDG Ventures and existing investor Outbox Ventures.

The venture plans to utilise this fund for strengthening its technology and to enhance the site content by adding video content, automated content creation tools, social publishing features and personalization.

Founded by Anirudh Gupta and Michael Lyngdoh, Tripoto seeks to be the one-stop app for travellers to discover, plan and in the near future, carry out transactions around the community model. Prior founding this, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, Gupta co-founded another startup called Notion Ink. Similarly, Lyngdoh, who holds a master's degree in economics from Delhi School of Economics and an MBA from ISB, co-founded HST Solar) before founding Tripoto.

"What we have cracked so far is incredible. We are one of the very rare platforms in India that have managed to create a community and user generated content at such scale and quality," said Lyngdoh.

Startup claim that its app downloads have gone from 0 to 250,000 and the cumulative monthly users across platforms have increased more than 3 times from 600,000 to 2 million.

"Users are publishing their travel stories, itineraries and experiences in large numbers on our platform. Our content is highly structured with mapped data, timestamps, GPS location which allows innumerable applications of our data. We also have managed to collect one of the largest dataset in India about travel preferences of our users in the form of travel interests, travel wish-lists, search histories and browsing patterns," said Lyngdoh.

Enabling users to crowd-source travel itineraries and share experiences, Tripoto now has curated source of user-generated travel itineraries in the world with around 250,000 itineraries created through its web and mobile publishing platforms.

Every month, users publish more than 20,000 trips on the platform. It also has more than 1 million social interactions every month that include users messaging each other, adding trips to their wishlist and following inspiring travellers in the community.

"We are now working towards the extreme personalization of the user experiences on Tripoto through our own collected big data in travel. Personalized news-feeds, native ads and the deep integration of hotels and homestays into the content are the next steps for us. It is important that hotels and homestays that are relevant to the content and the context of the traveler and we are in a very strong position to solve that," said Gupta.

The startup competes with Bengaluru-based startups Thrillophilia and TripThirsty, which offer similar platform to their users. The company plans to continue to raise more capital to grow at an even faster pace and become the dominant travel 2.0 player in India and further look beyond India at a later stage.