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A rail ticketing app arrange by a pair of entrepreneurs pissed off by the dearth of legroom in standard-class carriages will this announce a multimillion pound fundraising backed by a syndicate of blue-chip buyers.
Sky Information understands that Seatfrog, a privately owned rival to the London-listed firm Trainline, has secured £6m in new backing from shareholders together with Pembroke, a enterprise capital agency which has backed profitable UK firms together with the style model Me + Em and 5 Guys, the burger chain.
Octopus Ventures and Praetura are additionally taking part within the funding spherical, which is anticipated to be introduced publicly on Tuesday.
It was unclear at what valuation the brand new capital had been raised.
Seatfrog, which says it achieved income progress of over 800% final yr, was launched in 2018 by chief government Iain Griffin and Dirk Stewart.
Its preliminary goal was to deal with the 570m first-class seats stay empty on British rail journeys yearly.
Since launching, it claims to have saved passengers greater than £43m by serving to them to improve or change trains.
There was persistent unhappiness for a few years amongst shoppers about the fee and complexity of British rail fares, with operators within the privatised trade routinely accused of gouging passengers and providing poor reliability and repair.
Seatfrog’s co-founders Dirk Stewart (l) and Iain Griffin launched the corporate
Seatfrog says its expertise advantages shoppers, but additionally prepare operators by serving to them to develop revenues from higher-value seats.
It has struck partnerships with 16 prepare operators protecting greater than 3bn journeys throughout the UK and Europe yearly.
The corporate’s most up-to-date alliance has been with the Italian operator Trenitalia.
“Our mission is to be the platform of selection for rail, serving to individuals fall in love with taking the prepare once more, and enabling operators to run extra worthwhile networks filled with happier, much less confused passengers – it is lengthy overdue,” Mr Griffin mentioned.
“With the launch of our Practice Swap function throughout the UK and our enlargement into new European markets, we’re unleashing a brand new platform that helps passengers get an unrivalled expertise and operators run extra environment friendly networks properly past the capabilities of legacy expertise.”
Fred Ursell, funding director at Pembroke Funding Managers, mentioned the dearth of innovation within the rail sector was among the many key components in British buyer dissatisfaction and hailed Seatfrog’s “disruptive enterprise mannequin, product market match and huge market mixed with a world-class group”.
Rival app Trainline listed in London in 2019, having been owned by various non-public fairness corporations.
It now has a market worth of near £1.2bn.
finnCap suggested Seatfrog on the funding spherical.
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