Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV), a tourism-focused startup studio in Kenya, has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to help build the next generation of startups that use technology to modernise the tourism industry.

Klister Credit Corp., a Canadian investment firm, The Untours Foundation, and a number of angel investors, such as Fede Pirzio-Biroli, founder of Playfair Capital; Ian McCaig, former CEO of lastminute.com and M-Kopa board member; Anthony Rock, president of Rock Impact Capital; Rich Hoops, executive director at Impact Capital; Jim Villanueva, managing director of Global Partnerships Social Venture Fund; and Helena Riese Harstad

A Look At What The Does

In early 2020, right before the spread of COVID, Ben Peterson, Mikul Shah, and Jan van der Does de Willebois created Purple Elephant Ventures.

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It is the goal of the venture studio to launch four new businesses per year that explore the convergence of travel, the environment, and cutting-edge technology.

“I think what’s exciting for the team is all of the possibilities to digitize tourism for a greener future. And one of the great advantages of working in a studio is that we get to play around with new innovative ideas all the time. We have what we call ideation sessions, where we have very structured conversations around examining the tourism industry from the perspective of building businesses that will help reduce the carbon footprint of Africa’s tourism industry,” said CEO Ben Peterson. 

Despite the COVID pandemic’s effect on the tourist industry, the PEV team continued to push forward, launching two new businesses: the SaaS application Elephant Bookings and the content-to-commerce magazine Nomad.Africa.

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Elephant Reservations is a business-to-business platform that takes hotels online and boosts their occupancy rates through direct bookings. Shah, the original creator of Nomad.Africa, also created the food-searching website EatOut Africa. Currently, the venture studio is on the lookout for co-founders and chief executive officers for two separate firms.

“There are thousands of startups in agriculture, FinTech, energy and health — all the major sectors of the African economy, but very few in tourism, and only a handful have raised capital. This is despite the fact that tourism is one of the largest sectors on the continent,” said Peterson, also the former senior partner at AHL Venture Partners, an early-stage VC in Africa.

“It sort of struck me as odd so I started looking into why that is the case, and at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that it is a massive industry with real margins but it is completely stuck in the 1970s in the way that it operates. Most tourism organizations barely have any online presence. You even go to the websites of the most expensive Safari lodges and you can’t even book a room. You have to email or call an agent and it takes multiple steps to actually make a booking,” he said, adding that Elephant Bookings is the solution to the first gap PEV saw in the market.

Peterson stated that PEV’s research showed the industry in Africa was ready for disruption due to the rapid expansion of the sector.

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“I realized there’s an issue with modernization of this industry and we started to look at it a little bit further. And I quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t just one business opportunity to modernize the tourism sector. There were dozens of potential ways to do it.”

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh