When Peter Wachira and Collins Muthinja put together a foolproof business plan and approached financiers, they quickly discovered that it would take more than a good pitch to get their travel tech firm on its feet.
The duo had done their homework well and established a need in the market that their product was well suited to address and therefore thought that venture capitalists (VC) would be falling over themselves in their rush to fund their startup.
The reality, however, was that the VCs could hardly wait for their pitches to end to turn them down.
“The idea of getting VCs in 2021, especially in the African travel scenery, was an illusion. Most investors wouldn’t even look at your pitch twice because you are getting into a marketplace that is a complete nightmare,” says Collins.
Knowing they had a unique product, they were not discouraged. They decided to bootstrap Triply.co's operations.
Triply is a one-stop shop platform that converges all travel requirements, from hunting for ideal destinations to booking and processing of payments.
Peter sniffed the business opportunity when while running a vacation rental business, he was troubled by the fragmentation of the local travel industry.
At the time, Collins was piloting an insurer-tech business that was seeking to assist boda boda riders to take up covers using a pay-as-you-go model.
“The idea started back in February 2021. Peter reached out and he was like, ‘I’ve seen this particular need in the market and I think you’d be the best guy to do it being that you’ve been in the tech scene for close to seven years now’,” recalls Collins.
Having ran a vacation rental business that boasted between 1,000 and 2,000 units, Peter had a panoramic view of the challenges that bedevilled the sector. It also helped that the two friends share travelling as a hobby.
“If you wanted to plan your travel itinerary within Africa, or any part of Kenya for that matter, you’d probably need to go to so many platforms before you could get full information regarding your travel needs. So we sought to build one unified platform that would ensure that all these needs are addressed at one-stop-shop,” Collins explains.
However, the rejection by the VCs was their first reality check about the murky waters of the travel tech industry.
The sailing at the start was anything but smooth, forcing them to scale down their operations after a few months. To cut down on costs, they also had to close down their first office which was located near the Thika Road Mall (TRM) and shift their operations to one of Peter’s residential rooms.
Away from the cash-related struggles, the duo soon came to the realisation that they had ventured into a sector dominated by foreign giants such as Airbnb, Booking.com and Tripadvisor among others that had been around for years.
They were also short of manpower, as Collins was one of the only two software engineers working to develop the infrastructure on both the back and front ends of the platform, while Peter focused on customer interviews to understand their pressing needs.
The first ray of hope came in November 2022 when the co-founders pocketed a $50,000 (Sh6.7 million at current exchange rates) cheque from Nairobi-based accelerator and investment firm Baobab Network.
“That is when it dawned on me that if investors of this calibre – Silicon Savannah investors – are looking at my pitch and they’re making sense out of it, then we’re definitely doing something,” notes Collins.
Triply.co was recently thrust into the limelight after it bagged $500,000 (Sh67.3 million) in accelerator funding from the coveted Y Combinator. It plans to use the money to power its next phase of growth.
The funding made Triply Y Combinator’s first-ever travel tech investment in Africa and propelled the home-grown firm to join the ranks of Nigerian fintech companies Flutterwave and Paystack, alongside other global brands like Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit.
The success of the application, Peter says, came after four flopped bids in both 2022 and 2023, and he credits the business’ resilience for the honour.
“From when we started pitching to Y Combinator, up until when we got in, it was quite a long time. So the business was able to survive all that while unlike some ventures we’ve seen raise VC monies and close down shortly thereafter,” he states.
He adds, “Triply has survived the test of time and I think that’s one thing that Y Combinator was looking at – the resilience.”
Growth plans
With the new financing, the firm plans to venture into new verticals that will include partnerships with tour operators as well as launch of its own travel packages, as it seeks to grow its reach from the facilitation of hotel and vacation rental bookings that it currently offers.
Advice to upcoming entrepreneurs?
“Building a business, especially in Africa, has never been harder. It is less of a linear process than it was, say in 2019 or 2020 when everyone was just pushing money into the continent,” observes Muthinja.
“Now, it is purely based on meritocracy. It is purely based on how well your business is performing and how well you are able to listen to your customers. The era of using public relations (PR) as your growth facilitator is gone. If you don’t have a customer-centric business, then you’re just waiting for the downfall.
