Austrian Miavia has just announced a 100.000-dollar seed investment from angel investor Daniel Rose. The Vienna-based startup, which provides a platform for travelers who want to log and share their experiences, has been looking for potential investors since the end of last year. CEO Andreas Röttl talked to inventures.eu about the details of the deal and the future plans of the startup.
This is Miavia’s first investment and the team made a conscious decision in having Daniel Rose, whose family business is the Austrian fashion label Jones, as their investor. “He worked for Hollister, was travelling all the time, so that was perfect for Miavia. Also his know-how of e-commerce and his good connections to the States suited us best,” Röttl said. With USA being their second largest market after Austria, Miavia plans to strengthen its connections across the pond and will, as a first step, take part in the Plug and Play Tech Center acceleration programme in San Fransisco this summer.
Currently, the team are counting 5.000 visitors per month and the investment will help them reach 10.000 registered users by the end of this year. The startup will also use the financial support to grow their team with web developers, marketing and sales people and to launch its mobile iOS app this summer.
My travel guide, my way
Miavia is based in Vienna’s sektor5 and was founded in 2013 by the self-proclaimed Maggelans Röttl, Bianca Busetti, and Christian Papauschek. Miavia, meaning “my way”, relies on personal experiences and authentic descriptions of cities and places and provides a platform for exchanging “handcrafted travel guides”.
Through logging on “travel boxes”, users can share their travel moments and earn money by selling them to other users. This is also how the startup earns money. Depending on the amount of information users log into their travel boxes, an automatic price is created. Miavia collects a 20-percent commission on the boxes sold on their platform.
The team’s next step will be to release their mobile app, and it is expected to be a “semiautomatic” travel blog to operate on the way.
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