Eddy Travels Closes €1.1 Million in Pre-Seed Funding led by Practica Capital

Eddy Travels has raised an additional 600,000 EUR investment, closing a pre-seed round of 1.1 million Euros. The round was led by Practica Capital VC fund, with participation from Open Circle Capital, Techstars Toronto, and angel investors. 

Over 2 million users worldwide have sent voice and text messages to Eddy Travels to find the best travel deals. The digital assistant is available on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, and other popular chat apps. Eddy Travels is building a unique machine learning technology for natural language processing and personalization.

The new investment will be used for the immediate development of features to help travellers during the coronavirus crisis. After the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions will be lifted, the funding will be used to expand to new markets.

“The travel industry was severely hit, and it will take some time to recover from COVID-19 impact, we also believe traveller habits might change. Eddy Travels is in a unique position to use this pause and emerge strongly to serve the new needs of travellers and the travel industry with natural language processing and personalization technology. We been with the company already for a year and based on  Eddy Travels growth and a plan to use new opportunities we are leading Eddy Travels pre-seed round.” - Donatas Keras, partner at Practica Capital.

Will Cardwell, partner at Open Circle Capital: "Before the crisis, Eddy Travels was able to grow in a few months from 100k users to nearly 2M users. The numbers show that travellers around the world already require advanced yet simple to use solutions to plan travel, and new needs will emerge after the COVID-19 crisis. We believe that additional investment and the founders' experience will help Eddy Travels to emerge as one of the top travel tech startups.”

Eddy Travels is a travel tech startup, founded by Edmundas Balčikonis, Pranas Kiziela, and Adomas Baltagalvis in Lithuania. Now Eddy Travels HQ is in Toronto, Canada with an R&D office in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Practica Capital is a dedicated Baltic venture capital investment firm focusing on investments in the Baltic and Baltic-origin ventures in Europe. The firm invests in seed, late seed and Series A ventures backing great teams behind the tech-driven businesses from the region since 2011.

Practica Venture Capital II venture capital fund is implemented from the Business Financing Fund, a fund of funds established by the Ministry of Economy together with the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Lithuania, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). under the 2014-2020 Operational Programme for the EU Funds’ Investments in Lithuania and managed by Invega.

Open Circle Capital is a venture fund management company focusing on early-stage Lithuanian start-ups in Deep-Tech, ICT and robotics technologies.

Techstars Toronto is part of Techstars accelerator network, which provides 3-month startup accelerator programs around the world, up to $120 thousand in funding, and mentorship. Techstars Toronto is supported by Real Ventures.