Leading European shuttle platform, GoOpti, today announced receipt of €2.9m in Series A funding and a further €1.5m in EU grant funding (Horizon 2020). Investors in the Series A included EBRD, Point Nine and RTA. The funds will be used to expand further across several European locations.
GoOpti, available via web or mobile platform, connects passengers travelling from smaller towns to big airports. Since launching in 2011, GoOpti has grown to 700,000 passengers, 500 shuttles, 723 partnerships (with shuttle companies, agencies and airlines including SkyScanner, Emirates and Costa cruises) and shuttles passengers across Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.
With global car sales slowing and air travel on the rise, founder Marko Guček, together with his business partner, Tomaž Lorenzetti, identified a gap in the TaaS (transport as a service) market.
The pair, who previously founded Slovenia’s largest business travel centre, Uniglobe, saw there were no cost-effective transport services for passengers travelling from smaller regional cities to larger airport hubs with more flight options.
Guček says that for those living in cities with populations between 100 – 800k, of which there are 540 in Europe, transport choices – particularly over longer distances, such as from their home or workplace to a large airport hub – are limited.
Marko Guček says: “A quarter of all Europeans live and work in regional cities and this is only set to increase as the population grows – along with the cost of living in capital cities. Before we started GoOpti, travellers from that group were faced with having to negotiate often expensive and inconvenient flight schedules from their closest airport. The other choice, taking a private car to a larger airport one or two hours away, is often prohibitively expensive and stressful for many people.
“Those companies previously covering longer distance travel were small players using manual dispatch systems. Having to guarantee a certain number of passengers to make the trip worthwhile meant frequent last minute cancellations if there weren’t enough bookings.
“GoOpti’s platform solves problems for passengers who can now order an affordable, convenient and direct transfer within a desired time frame from home to the airport whilst shuttle companies get marketing, sales, route planning and customer support.”