Welcome Pickups, an Athens-based startup offering a range of “in-destination” travel services from the point of pickup onwards, has raised €3.3 million in Series A funding. The backing comes from VentureFriends, Market One Capital, Howzat, Jabbar, and Openfund. Also participating is Alejandro Artacho, who founded Spotahome, and John Tsioris, founder of Instashop.

Launched in Greece in 2015, Welcome Pickups believes it has spotted an opportunity that moves local travel services beyond a “commoditized transfer service” to a more holistic in-destination travel experience. The idea is that from the moment you arrive at a new destination and until departure, Welcome Pickups will be able to accommodate all of your travel needs, spanning transfers, travel products, things to do, and travel information.

“The travel experience after the flight and hotel booking step is broken,” says Welcome Pickups co-founder and CEO Alex Trimis. “[The] in-destination vertical is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that remains fragmented and offline. Welcome, starting from transportation, will become its leader while assisting players in the other two segments to offer a better and more complete service”.

Trimis says the startup turns airport transfer into a travel experience by using this first step as a gateway to cover all other in-destination needs. To achieve this, Welcome Pickups claims to be creating the most robust and complete in-destination travel data-set in existence.

“Apart from the traveler’s problems, we are also sorting out a number of partner problems,” adds Trimis. This includes helping hotels and other short stay providers personalise their guest experience and optimise operations through the use of Welcome Pickups’ data.

More broadly, the draw is that by “safeguarding” the travel experience at destination, return bookings and recommendations are a lot more likely to happen.

To that end, Welcome Pickups says that in 2018 the company serviced over 400,000 travellers in 32 destinations. It estimates that it will welcome over 1 million travellers in 2019, and says it now employs a team of 60 people, mainly in Athens and Barcelona.

Meanwhile, the Greek startup will use the new funding to expand its product offerings, strengthen the core team and increase the Welcome Pickups destination network. This will include adding more travel industry partners, such as cruise lines and airlines, and also enhance customer experience with a traveller app.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Welcome Pickups lands €3.3M funding to offer ‘in-destination’ travel services

French startup Doctolib has raised a new round of funding of $170 million (€150 million). The round is led by General Atlantic, with existing investors Accel, Eurazeo, Kernel and Bpifrance also participating. Some German healthcare entrepreneurs are also joining the round — the company isn’t detailing the names of those investors.

But Doctolib is detailing an important metric — its valuation. Based on this new round, Doctolib now has a post-money valuation of $1.13 billion (€1 billion). There’s a new unicorn in town.

Doctolib first started with a scheduling service for health practitioners. For €109 per month ($124), you can replace your calendar with Doctolib and let the startup take care of your week. Patients can book an appointment on Doctolib’s website and everything stays in sync between your own calendar and your public calendar.

More recently, Doctolib expanded to new countries and new types of practitioners. The company is now live in Germany and now also works with hospitals. Some hospitals have completely switched their scheduling system to Doctolib. Doctolib essentially became the leading cloud service for healthcare scheduling.

There are currently 75,000 practitioners and 1,400 healthcare facilities using Doctolib. The company works with 750 people and has offices in 40 different cities — it sounds like you need to have a local team in order to convince doctors in a specific area.

And now, the startup wants to expand to new services. In January, the company launched its telemedicine service. Existing Doctolib customers can now flip a switch and start accepting remote appointments.

This is a natural extension of Doctolib’s booking service. In addition to finding the right doctor and booking an appointment, you can now have a video consultation with a healthcare professional and get a digital prescription in your account.

Doctolib has focused on a limited feature set for years. But the company now has a shot at becoming a sort of Salesforce for the healthcare industry — a software-as-a-service company with a range of services to help practitioners switch from traditional software suites to browser-based applications.

For instance, Doctolib could expand beyond patient-to-doctor relationships and facilitate doctor-to-doctor collaboration as well.

With today’s funding round, the company will double the size of the team within the next three years across the board. In addition to sales people, the company will also double the size of the technology, product and design teams in order to launch new products. And finally, Doctolib will also expand to new countries.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Doctolib is now a unicorn with new 0 million round