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Bach, an app for planning bachelor trips and group travel experiences, announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital. The app on Google Play Store and iOS App Store is designed to help users plan a group trip with their friends from start to finish.
Launched in 2020, Batch aims to solve the problem behind coordinating group travel by allowing groups to find, plan and book trips all in one place. The app lets you invite your friends to plan an upcoming trip. Then you can all discuss what you want to do and decide on the best place for the trip based on cost and needs. Once you and your friends share these details, you can put together an itinerary and use the app’s expense sharing feature to track all travel expenses. Batch also includes a marketplace that reviews experiences near your destination that can be booked through the app.
Although Batch started as an app, the company is ready to go beyond mobile. The startup has announced the launch of a new online marketplace that will allow users to register their experiences starting next month. Bach CEO and co-founder Mike Petrakis told TechCrunch in an interview that the company believes that by bringing the marketplace to the web, it can attract more users than just booking bachelorette trips.
“We’re opening Bach to the Internet,” Petrakis said. “Right now, if you’re going on a bachelor trip and you have to go through a few different steps to access the marketplace that we’ve built, you have to download the app. So the thought process was very simple: let’s put this on the Internet. I believe that people will start to gravitate towards us beyond the bateret parties. If one wants to find a party bus to book in Nashville, it should not be for a bachelor party. The same goes for an ATV tour in Scottsdale or a brunch reservation in Vegas.
The company currently offers domestic experiences in major US travel destinations, including Scottsdale, Nashville and Las Vegas, and will be available in 30 cities by the end of Q1 2023. Experiences that can be booked include private chefs, goat yoga, ATV excursions, party buses. , ship charter and more.
Image Credits: Bach
Petrakis says the Bach in Bach app is approaching 500,000 parties and two million users to date. In the past six months, the company has doubled the number of book experiences on the platform from 800 to 1,600 and plans to reach 3,000 experiences by 2023.
Regarding the new funding, the company stated that it will be used for strategic hiring; It also laid the groundwork for expanding the platform beyond ballet parties.
Petrakis said, “With the financial support, we are planting our roots to expand beyond the Bataret parties.” “Bach’s launch on the web and finding us on the internet will be the first step to doing that. The idea is two-fold: first let’s take over this place and then branch out to be a destination for groups who want to go out on the weekend. We want to be the platform they think of when they want to book something fun.”
The funding includes participation from Corazon Capital, Freestyle VC, Oversubscribed Ventures and other institutional partners. The new investment brings the company’s total funding to $17 million. Bach raised $8 million in seed funding led by Corazon Capital last April.
“Millennial travel is a huge opportunity, and the future of travel, especially group travel, is changing rapidly,” said Sonia Nagar, venture capital partner at the Pritzker Group, in a statement. Although group travel is a $200 billion market, consumers find coordination challenging in most cases. Not only has BACH become the market leader and proven to be a permanent fixture in Bachelor, but in doing so it is building the foundation to open up group travel on a wider scale.
Although bachelor parties represent the company’s area of expertise and entry into the group travel space, Petrakis says Bach has plenty of options to expand the business because people are already using it for girls’ getaways, birthday trips, spring break trips and more.
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