Week 7 | Skyscanner
Struggling to find cheap flights for a skiing trip to the Alps, IT consultant Gareth Williams decided to collate all the prices
Founded: 2001
Headquarters: Edinburgh, Scotland
VC backer: SEP
First VC investment: 2007
Total VC raised to date: £2.5m
Like many great ideas, Skyscanner was borne from frustration. Struggling to find cheap flights for a skiing trip to the Alps, IT consultant Gareth Williams decided to collate all the prices he found into a single excel spreadsheet. Ten years later and he is CEO of Europe's number one flight search engine.
Together with co-founders Barry Smith (business development director) and Bonamy Grimes (product director), Williams hadn't run a company before but after realising the potential of the business all three quit their jobs and put in their own money to get it off the ground (no pun intended).
Skyscanner version one was released in 2002, and the following year employed its first staff member. In 2004 it opened in Edinburgh, where it remains today, and at last count employs around 40 people, with an office in Poland.
At first the site focused solely on European budget airlines but has since grown to include most of the big name carriers, including the likes of British Airways, Air France and Virgin, as well as US and Canadian airlines, offering flights to destinations around the world.
In 2007 UK venture capital firm SEP got involved, investing £2.5m. Since then the company has increased sales by 87% to £8.8m, and last year generated more than US$1bn of online ticket sales for airlines. It receives 10 million visits a month performing 50 million searches, and operates in 23 languages comparing prices on 670,000 routes flown by more than 600 airlines.
Never one to rest on its laurels, Skyscanner has appointed a new chairman in October last year ahead of a major push into new markets. Ray Nolan, the founder of Web Reservations International, steps into the big chair.
Struggling to find cheap flights for a skiing trip to the Alps, IT consultant Gareth Williams decided to collate all the prices
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