The Porto-based startup Take a City will soon represent Portugal at the Dublin Web Summit, which is starting tomorrow. We talked with Reinaldo Ferreira, Take a City’s Founder and CEO, just before the conference starts.
Hi Ronaldo! Can you give us an introduction as to what Take a City is doing?
Take a City offers tools for travellers to complement and integrate online services and expert advice. Our platform can be used by Travel Agents and Local Operators to target individual preferences, organise information and documents, provide permanent support and develop long term relationships.
Sounds interesting – can you please explain it in detail?
We want to build a platform that can help people find and purchase travel-related services, on desktop or mobile. This includes not only the plane ticket, hotel room and restaurant booking, but also concert tickets, special transport arrangements, bus passes, you name it. Across all locations there are plenty of professional service providers willing to not just sell a standardised package but also a personalised experience; your local travel agent can help you whenever you want and, mainly whenever things go wrong and you find yourself stuck in an airport, left without hotel or in a middle of a train strike. Now all of this can be done with an integrated platform that provides a great user experience, in a digital format.
In what phase of development is Take a City at now?
We have developed most of the architecture and made our beta web site available. We’ve invested a lot in the data model to cope with the potential technology integration challenges. One of our breakthrough offerings is the personal preferences engine, which we haven’t made available yet, however you can already check in to each city that you’ve visited across the world. The next focus will be on the mobile platform. We are preparing a worldwide launch and we’ll be releasing additional features regularly.
Can you tell us how many users and customers you have now?
We are not yet pushing registrations, but users just keep coming in steadily. Most importantly for us in the short term, we already have a few hundred travel agents registered and some tens of thousands in the marketing pipeline. We’ve defined 1,000 cities for the global roll-out and we’ve made ground tests at Take a City Porto with more than 1,000 volunteers and in three additional cities. We’re setting up Take a City Dublin right now and are taking the opportunity of being here to make an additional test.
Why are you going to visit the Dublin Web Summit?
Take a City was selected by the organisation within over 600 applications from all over the world to exhibit at the conference. This is an incredible opportunity to network and partnership. With 3000+ participants, I guess I’ll have some busy days.
Can I ask you how much capital you already invested into the project and if you are looking for additional investors?
Yes, that’s OK. We invested €450K up to now and we are currently looking for additional seed funding.
So what can we expect from you in the short term?
Going for a global roll out is a major step that we can only take if we find all the necessary means for it. So we’re being very careful. Still, you are going to see a lot happening before the end of the year.
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[…] this idea we had now”. A third and final comment goes to the startups exhibition (disclaimer: I was there with one of the startups invited). Participating startups filled detailed company profiles twice at the request of the organization […]