Kenyan-based venture studio with a focus on Tourism, Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV) has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to boost innovation in Africa’s tourism.
The venture studio seeks to achieve this goal by building creative startups from scratch focused on leveraging technology to scale tourism, as it plans to build about four startups at the intersection of travel, climate, and technology, every year.
Investors who took part in this recent $1 million pre-seed funding round include Klister Credit Corporation, a Canadian investment firm, and The Untours Foundation.
Also 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, co-founder and chair of the Optimizer Foundation.
Speaking on the recent seed raised and the startup mission, Purple Elephant Ventures CEO Ben Peterson said, “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.”
He further disclosed that despite the uncertainty in the tourism sector during the Covid pandemic period, the Purple Elephant Ventures team did not slow down on its efforts, rather they went on to launch two startups during that period, which are Elephant Bookings, a software service (SaaS) product, and Nomad.Africa, a content-to-commerce magazine.
Purple Elephant Ventures seeks to enable startups in the tourism sector raise enough capital to facilitate sustainability, as well as have an online presence to aid global scale.
Founded in 2020, the company’s mission is To build a portfolio of innovative companies that unlock the unrivaled economic power of tourism to protect and grow Africa’s natural capital.