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Bach, a group travel app for planning bachelorette trips, has announced $ 8 million in seed funding led by Corazon Capital. The app, which is available on both the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store, is designed to help users plan a group trip with their friends from start to finish.
Mike Petrakis, the founder and CEO of Bach, told TechCrunch that the idea for Bach came from his personal experiences with travel. He noted that he’s been on a number of bachelor parties and surf trips and was the one who would always plan out the details for these trips. Petrakis says he found that it was especially hard to plan bachelor parties because there are different group dynamics, budgets and personalities that you have to factor in when doing so. Petrakis and Bach COO Sarah Sprague wanted to solve the pain points behind planning a group trip by combining key features in one place.
Once you download the app, you start by inviting your friends to the upcoming trip on the app, after which you can all chat about what you want to do and determine the best location for the trip based on costs and interests. Once you and your friends have ironed out these details, you can put an itinerary together and then use the app’s expense-splitting feature to track all the costs of the trip. Bach also includes a marketplace that curates experiences near your destination that can be booked through the app.
“After seeing groups use the app, we realized there was a gap in the market – it’s not easy for groups to find niche experiences that are easy to book,” Petrakis said. “Our users were planning and sharing itineraries in the app, and we used the itinerary data in the planning tools to see the amazing experiences that people were having on their trips. This real-time user knowledge served as a roadmap to put the best experiences across the country into a marketplace. ”
Image Credits: Bach
The app launched in early 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Given that travel was stalled during this time, Petrakis and Sprague used the downtime to test and build out this marketplace. Bach is now able to connect its users to more than 800 local vendors that are offering bookable experiences. Examples of these bookable experiences include private chefs, goat yoga, ATV excursions, party buses, yacht charters and more. Bach is now on track for 20,000 in-app booking in 2022. The experiences can be booked in 10 cities: Nashville, Scottsdale, Austin, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, Palm Springs, Savannah, Charleston and San Diego.
The company topped out at 20,000 monthly active parties last year and is on its way to 100,000 monthly active parties in 2022. Bach says that the average party size for active users is typically between five to six people.
As for the new funding, Petrakis says the company will put it toward building its team and investing in the app’s growth. “We’re making key hires across technology, marketplace and marketing teams. We’re also ramping up our supply of bookable experiences to ensure we can keep up with the big summer ahead of us, ”he said.
Bach’s seed funding round included co-investment from Freestyle Capital and Oversubscribed Ventures, which is a new fund from Erin and Sara Foster, and Purple Arch Ventures. The round also included participation from other investors, including Rich Paul, Simon Tikhman and Chief Zaruk, Ken Levitan and Mark Lawrence.
In terms of the future, Petrakis said that although bachelorette parties are the company’s wedge into the group travel space, the company has many options to expand its business. He stated that people are already using the app for girls trips, birthday trips, spring break trips and more. Petrakis outlined that Bach intentionally started with a niche-focused app for planning bachelor and bachelorette trips and wants to ensure that it’s serving its customers’ exact interests first. The company also wants to focus on expanding into new cities once it has built sufficient presence in its core markets.
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