Duffel co-founder and CEO Steve Domin
Duffel
Founders: CEO Steve Domin, Tom Bates, Vincent Pastor
Headquarters: London
Last Fundraising Round: 2019
Investors: Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures, Y Combinator
When tech entrepreneur Steve Domin set out to build a product in travel about eight years ago, the challenges he found in accessing inventory gave rise to another product altogether.
Having previously worked in payments technology, Domin had seen the rise of companies like Stripe that via APIs could easily get developers building companies access to payment infrastructure. "The same wasn't true for travel," he said. "There's obviously an array of providers out there, but there wasn't anyone with whom you could just sign up to online and get started building the product we envisioned."
Domin decided that tackling the travel distribution challenge was a better idea than the original travel product, which gave birth to software platform Duffel.
Duffel started with its Flights product, with American Airlines as the first carrier to provide access to a test environment, Domin said. That has grown into a "full suite" of New Distribution Connections, about 30 in total, with global distribution system connections supplementing content not available via NDC, he said.
More recently, Duffel launched its Stays product, to give companies access to sell hotel and vacation rental inventory.
"It's the same philosophy as flights: very simple APIs with everything taken care of for you," Domin said. "You don't have to deal with the complex security or understand how it all works. We manage the relationships and do the settlement and all the fun things travel agents have to do."
Since the launch of Duffel, Spotnana has emerged as a growing force in the corporate travel space, providing APIs connecting a growing number of content sources to a growing stable of travel management companies. While Duffel also works with TMCs to access certain suppliers or capabilities, Domin said traditional TMCs are not a key area of focus for the company.
"We're very much focused on new entrants," he said. "We think we have more value to add to these types of providers."
Those providers generally have two ways to start selling travel, according to Domin. They could establish connections themselves to GDSs, direct connections to airlines and online travel agencies and build the necessarily flows needed to support the business. "That's quite extensive, and very few companies go down that path," Domin said. "It's a lot of work for a new product that you don't even know what the retails and adoption is going to be."
At the other end of the spectrum, the company could work with an end-to-end, white-labeled solution provider like Expedia, which requires much less effort but the buying company gives up customizability, he said.
"Duffel fits somewhere in the middle," Domin said. "We are low-level infrastructure enough that you can customize it to your needs and integrate it within your ecosystem of products, but it's also high-level that doesn't require you to know much about the travel industry itself, and we take care of all the heavy lifting when it comes to operating a travel business."
Among Duffel's most recent customers is San Francisco-based business software platform Rippling, which tapped Duffel to launch a corporate travel booking tool within its Spend Management suite. With that tool, users can book flights and hotels in Rippling and give finance teams insight to travel activity with receipts, VAT codes, exchange rates and budgets synced automatically.
As more companies look to bring AI solutions into travel, that is opening up a new customer base for Duffel, Domin said. That includes start-ups looking to "re-invent travel in the age of AI" and more established companies that want to play their own part in capturing the travel AI workflow.
"It's a brand-new field for us, and I think we're uniquely positioned with the work we've done the last couple of years to capture mindshare at least here," he said.
Duffel's last funding round was in 2019, when it raised $21.5 million in Series A funding followed by $30 million in Series B funding later that same year. The company hasn't raised since then but is now "more actively considering options" to do so, according to Domin.
"The business has been growing fantastically well these last 12 months, and we're starting to think of when is the right time to press on the accelerator," he said.