Velocity Ventures invests in social revenue technology platform Joyned
Joyned enables users to interact together on e-commerce travel sites with friends
SINGAPORE, 14 December 2023 – Velocity Ventures, Southeast Asia's leading venture capital firm focused on helping travel and hospitality solve industry challenges has just announced its latest investment in Joyned, an Israeli tech firm with an innovative social revenue technology platform. The investment will propel Joyned’s mission to become the global growth engine for brands in the travel and hospitality sector.
Joyned enables customers to book trips, vacations, and holidays together, making the travel booking experience collaborative and enabling groups of friends to make a purchase decision straightaway. It provides a cross-website, live experience for online shoppers, empowering travel sites of all sizes to own their shoppers’ natural social engagements directly on-site. The company's AI-based social revenue platform analyzes and identifies consumer group-buying intent from previously unavailable data.
Jonathan Abraham, CEO of Joyned said: “This investment by Velocity Ventures serves as a testament to the confidence placed in Joyned's social revenue technology, the way we're improving the buyer journey, and as a result, the business impact it has on the travel and hospitality industry. The funds raised will be instrumental in further developing and expanding our platform's capabilities, solidifying Joyned's position as a leader in the sector as we expand our footprint across Southeast Asia.”
Jonathan Cocks, Partner, Velocity Ventures said: “Joyned’s innovative approach to collaborative travel booking experiences and its ability to drive engagement and conversions make it a standout player in the market. This investment will help catalyse Joyned's expansion efforts and create lasting value for both customers and stakeholders. "
Joyned has made significant strides in its global expansion with of two key strategic partnerships: TravelUp, the UK's leading travel arrangements company, renowned for offering comprehensive solutions in flights, hotels, and package holidays worldwide, and Amadeus, the world's foremost provider of travel technology.
In September, Joyned appointed Sergio Vargas Johansson as Managing Director of Travel. With over 20 years of experience, including his last role as VP of Online Travel Companies in EMEA at Amadeus, Sergio brings a wealth of travel and technology expertise to spearhead Joyned’s commercial strategy, market expansion, and business development within the travel sector.
To add to recent achievements, Joyned has been honored with the 'Most Successful Scale-Up' title at the prestigious Hustle Awards 2023 in August. Moreover, in November, Joyned recieved the coveted "Best Technology Product" award at the Travolution.com Awards 2023. These accolades underscore Joyned's position as a trailblazer in the industry.
As Joyned continues its journey of growth and innovation, these strategic partnerships, leadership appointments, and industry accolades mark significant milestones in our pursuit of redefining the future of travel technology.
Velocity Ventures is the most proactive investor in the travel and hospitality tech space in Southeast Asia and with this latest investment in Joyned, has eleven portfolio companies.
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About Joyned
Joyned enables customers to book trips, vacations, and holidays together, making the travel booking experience collaborative. It provides a cross-website, live experience for online shoppers, empowering travel sites of all sizes to own their shoppers’ natural social engagements directly on-site. The company's AI-based social revenue platform analyzes and identifies consumer group-buying intent from previously unavailable data. Coupled with actionable insights, it provides visibility into buyers’ decision-making process, intent, group dynamics, conversations, and activities to maximize revenue. Global online travel agencies, hotel chains, booking sites, and travel tech providers rely on Joyned to uncover hidden opportunities and optimize their offering thereby maximizing revenue, conversions, and customer lifetime value. (https://www.joyned.co)
About Velocity Ventures
Velocity Ventures is a Singapore-based venture capital firm with a unique focus on the Hospitality and Travel industry in Southeast Asia. We invest in visionary entrepreneurs who are passionate about reshaping the Hospitality and Travel sector, with a focus on early to growth stage tech-enabled companies across 5 verticals: Travel Services, Transportation, Accommodation, Food & Beverage, and Experiences. (www.velocityventures.vc)
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Velocity Ventures’ Other Portfolio Companies
1. Aigens
Aigens provides fully integrated mobile, middleware and hardware solutions to help restaurants and hotels grow revenue, improve productivity and deliver superior customer experience. Aigens AI-powered solutions allow mobile, BYOD, online, and kiosk omni-channel ordering solutions, and integrate with over 100 POS, payment and delivery platforms providing Asia’s only fully integrated restaurant and hospitality operating system.
Food Market Hub is an end-to-end procurement management platform which automates all back-end operations for F&B businesses. Food Market Hub allows restaurants to manage existing suppliers and connect with new suppliers, all while providing seamless payments options, and minimizing food cost and wastage using AI. Likewise, suppliers use Food Market Hub to manage and consolidate orders and collections. Food Market Hub is building towards the future of F&B by enabling this massively underserved segment with a complete ecosystem covering sourcing, supply chain and financing.
3. Tablevibe
Founded by ex-Googlers, Tablevibe is a commission-free online ordering system for restaurants and aims to help restaurants drive pickup and delivery orders on their own websites & apps. The platform also help restaurants attract new direct customers, boost online ratings, and grow customer lifetime value.
4. TripGuru:
A local tour operating platform that designs authentic travel experiences and connects travellers to its network of top-quality tour guides. The tech-enabled platform empowers local tour guides with the tools to engage a larger global audience, convey their local knowledge and commitments to sustainable tourism. With over 350 curated experiences across 18 destinations in 7 countries, TripGuru supports multiple languages to cater to a wide demographic of travellers visiting Southeast Asia and Latin America.
ZUZU helps independent hotels grow their revenues by solving their Revenue and Distribution Management challenges with a proprietary all-in-one hotel operating system. ZUZU offers resource and time-strapped hotels the technology and expertise of larger hotel chains with none of their associated costs and restrictions.
ZYTLYN helps companies address their most important retailing and eCommerce challenges and opportunities with actionable predictive insights. ZYTLYN Demand Forecast, is a unique product focused on providing predictive travel intelligence to airlines, travel agencies, airports, destinations, hotels, car rentals, retailers, and luxury brands. Powered by global data and Machine Learning technology ZYTLYN Prediction Platform gives customers the ability to optimise decision making leveraging predictive demand.
Hyper is a leading innovator in the field of autonomous fast-food restaurants. As a solutions provider to food-service operators, Hyper designs, builds, and operates fully autonomous robotic box stores that can perform all functions in a fast-food kitchen without the need of a human workforce. This ground-breaking concept will propel the food service industry towards operations process excellence as it seeks to help businesses deploy cloud kitchens faster and easily.
8. Carbon Click
B Corp certified, New Zealand headquartered CarbonClick is a global leader in high-trust climate action, working with over 1,000 brands around the world. Since its inception in 2017, CarbonClick has made notable inroads with its expertise in the aviation, travel, and airports sectors. CarbonClick helps build consumer trust in carbon offsets programmes by providing full details of the offset by ensuring a receipt is emailed to each customer, showing where and how their contributions have been used with a “track and trace” feature.
9. Tripbtoz
Tripbtoz launched its service in June 2017 as an Online Travel Agency (OTA) based on user-generated videos. It introduced the "T2E (Travel 2 Earn)" service to connect travel experiences between users and allows them to travel again by offering rewards for engagement from other users. Tripbtoz received 'The Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism Award' at the 2020 Challenge K-Startup in November 2020 and the 'Prime Minister's Commendation' at the '49th Tourism Day Ceremony' in 2022.
10. BYHOURS
BYHOURS is the leading travel tech, in management and distribution of microstays, with a marketplace and mobile application worldwide that allows users to book microstays in more than 4.000 direct partner hotels (main International Hotel Chains and independent hotels) in packs of 3, 6 and 12 hours, with flexible check-in time during 24 hours of the day. Introducing the pay-per-use business model in the hospitality industry. In 2020, it launched a new SaaS (BYHOURS Direct) that allows hoteliers to market their rooms and meeting rooms by the hour from their own website, boosting their direct sales.
