The fin­Tech-com­pany, ucan­doo, is rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the mar­ket for travel financing

Erfurt, Ger­many based ucan­doo raised a sin­gle-digit mil­lion invest­ment from lead-investor bm|t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen gmbh and Alpanekino Ltd. ucan­doo is a fin­tech start-up that has devel­oped a plat­form to make financ­ing travel has­sle-free. Experts esti­mate that today 25 per­cent of all travel is financed, and the mar­ket is grow­ing strongly.

ucandoo´s plat­form replaces the cur­rent cum­ber­some path via banks and unites the largely sep­a­rate worlds of travel book­ing and travel financing.

Cus­tomers can now decide in a travel agency if they would like to pay for travel in the con­ven­tional man­ner or with a credit financ­ing with a max­i­mum 12-month dura­tion and a fair inter­est rate. With only a few data inputs, ucandoo´s part­ner bank per­forms an instant cred­it­wor­thi­ness check and deliv­ers a financ­ing deci­sion. The ser­vice is sim­ple and trans­par­ent for the cus­tomer and saves sig­nif­i­cant time spent fill­ing out paper­work at a bank, and, impor­tantly, allows for the time-shift­ing of pay­ment for travel.

ucan­doo is first launch­ing its plat­form for phys­i­cal travel agen­cies and will then address the online mar­ket in a sec­ond phase. In Ger­many, for exam­ple, over 60% of leisure travel is still booked with phys­i­cal travel agen­cies. ucan­doo has already won the largest travel-coop in Europe, Raif­feisen-Touris­tik­gruppe, with 7,000 travel agen­cies in Ger­many, Aus­tria, Bel­gian, Hol­land, and Lux­em­burg as a key part­ner. The ser­vice will be suc­ces­sively rolled out in Raif­feisen-Touris­tik­gruppe travel agen­cies through­out 2019. “The prod­uct should allow peo­ple to take trips that they pre­vi­ously could not have afforded,” explained share­holder and man­ager Julien Bahadir. Mr. Bahadir also believes the avail­abil­ity of easy financ­ing will result in the book­ing of higher-end travel. “This invest­ment will allow us to sus­tain­ably change the mar­ket for financed travel,” he added.

“We strengthen Thüringen´s Econ­omy through tar­geted invest­ments in inno­v­a­tive growth com­pa­nies with high poten­tial,” said Kevin Reeder, CEO of bm|t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment gmbh. “We believe in the ucan­doo team and that they will sig­nif­i­cantly con­tribute to the travel mar­ket. The startup from Erfurt has a strong idea and vision for dis­rupt­ing the travel financ­ing mar­ket with a sleek tech­nol­ogy plat­form that cre­ates a win-win sit­u­a­tion. The travel agen­cies can offer an added-value ser­vice that will increase their book­ings and trav­el­ers will now have addi­tional options for their travel.”

Con­tact:

Annette Brünger
ucan­doo GmbH
+49 (0) 163 3345100
www.ucandoo.de

About bm|t:

bm|t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen gmbh cur­rently man­ages eight invest­ment funds with a vol­ume of 320 Mio. EUR. As the uni­ver­sal invest­ment com­pany for the fed­eral state of Thuringia, bm|t invests in inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies across all sec­tors and stages, from seed invest­ments in star­tups to growth equity and mez­za­nine fund­ing for estab­lished com­pa­nies to suc­ces­sion invest­ments such as MBOs and MBIs. The company´s mis­sion is to strengthen Thuringia´s econ­omy while gen­er­at­ing pos­i­tive invest­ment results through tar­geted invest­ments in inno­v­a­tive growth com­pa­nies with high poten­tial. In addi­tion to cap­i­tal, bm|t brings a wealth of expe­ri­ence and a strong net­work to its investee-partners.