DealTracker - Cleartrip Raises $18.5 million Series C funding
According to this VCCircle post, Cleartrip, has received $18.5 million funding in Series C from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mahindra Group, taking the total funding received by Cleartrip to a little over $30 million. Earlier, Cleartrip had received $3.7 million funding (September 2005) from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo, $8 million from DAG Ventures and Gund (Oct 2006).
This also makes Cleartrip the second Indian online travel company to land three rounds of funding, after MakeMyTrip, which had received $38 million in three rounds of funding. According to Sandeep Murthy, CEO of Cleartrip, the money will be largely used to strengthen the offline presence, diversify the product mix and acquire a few companies (mainly offline) in car rental, cruises or even a meta search company.
Currently, air constitutes 78 per cent of the total travel ticketing pie, 15 per cent rail, 5 per cent hotel and the rest for other
related services. But an average travel agency sells 95 per cent air and 5 per cent hotel, leaving a lot of scope for diversifying the travel product mix.
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