June 21 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian travel platform company SpeediFly, which recently received financial backing via a Czech startup accelerator, plans to launch its services in London in mid-July as part of a planned expansion in most European cities by mid-2018, the company's COO and co-founder Stoyan Dobrev told SeeNews on Tuesday.
By November, SpeediFly plans to make its platform available to clients in major European cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Sofia, Dobrev told SeeNews over the phone.
Last week, Czech private investor Petr Zamecnik provided the startup company with 308,000 euro ($348,900) as the investment became a fact with the participation of Czech start-up accelerator StartupYard.
The funds will go to expand the company's Bulgaria-based development team and develop the social networking, smart recommendation and group booking features of the platform.
"We have contacted Singapore-based Roomorama and soon its services will be incorporated into the platform. [...] Our goal is to grow the platform into a social network for tourism experience taking into account customers' preferences and making it possible to share attractive promotions between users," Dobrev noted. Roomorama is a short-term and vacation rental website, headquartered in Singapore, which offers accommodation worldwide.
The travel platform will also sell tickets for various events.
Currently running in beta version for iOS, SpeediFly also plans to expand to Android and the web.
SpeediFly was founded in late 2015 and joined StartupYard, a seed accelerator for technology startups, in 2016.
The company estimates that there is an untapped potential of 10.2 billion euro in Europe's last-minute travel market. Furthermore, 56% of European travel searches for last minute bookings are for groups of three or more while none of the major meta-search engines specialize in group bookings, social features, or shared payments.
($= 0.8828 euro)