WAUG Travel (CEO, Sun Woo-yoon), which provides a global travel activity reservation platform called WAUG, announced on April 18th that it has attracted investments in Series C.
The investment has SBI Investment, Albatross Investment, Login Investment, Delta Investment and IBK Industrial Bank as new shareholders, including existing investors LB Investment and CompanyK Partners. The investment in this round is worth 11.5 billion won (about US$9.8million). The company secured an additional 2 billion won (about US$1.7 million) in funds from the Korea Credit Guarantee Fund’s selection of the first penguin company.
WAUG is selling 20,000 travel activity products in 170 cities. The mobile payment ratio is 84 percent, which is the most optimized free travel service for mobile devices. In January this year, the company entered overseas markets in earnest. More than 2,000 payments are made every month by overseas users, and over 80 percent are from Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore and the Philippines.
WAUG Travel is planning to further accelerate its size and growth by exploring global markets. It has established a Singaporean corporation and a Japanese branch and plans to make inroads into major Southeast Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Thailand, and the Philippines this year. It will also hire professional workers there to strengthen local partnerships and marketing.
It will also strengthen its own brand (PB) tour called WAUG Pink series. There are 21 WAUG Pink series operating in eight countries. Recently, it has continuously created new tours loved by travellers in their 20s, including “CSI WAUG Pink Dolphin Cruise” and “Bangkok WAUG Pink Palace Tour.” This year, the company plans to increase its own brand (PB) tour to 50 units.
“WAUG is a service that has stable profitability compared to its competitors based on already high product content quality and sales,” said Hwang Kyu-jin, head of SBI Investment’s team that led the investment.
