Page 32 - Wego PR REPORT - SEPTEMBER 2024

Company: Wego
Industry: Travel and hospitality

Ross Veitch is CEO and co-founder of the online travel company Wego which operates the MENA
region’s #1 travel app and is used by over 100 million travellers every year to search and book flights
and hotels.

The Wego Group also operates WegoPro, a business travel & expense management business,
WegoBeds, a B2B hotel booking platform, ShopCash a cashback e-commerce app and Wego Media
Solutions which runs digital campaigns for most of the tourism boards, airlines and hotel chains
operating in the region.
Wego was founded in Singapore way back in 2005 as a metasearch website focused on Southeast
Asia but in 2011 switched the focus to the MENA region where the conditions seemed right for the
then nascent online travel market to really take-off. The company established its Dubai Internet
City office in 2013 and now operates a dual headquarters model across both Dubai and Singapore.
Veitch is a resident of both Dubai and Singapore and travels so frequently between the two hubs
then he can just about do the DXB-SIN commute blind-folded. Wego has raised over $60m and is
backed by investors including Tiger Global Management, Ares Management, Square Peg Capital,
MBC Group, MEVP and Arqaam Capital. The company is one of the largest privately-held tech
companies in the MENA region and is likely to go public in the next few years.

A product guy by training and a passionate technologist, he is most absorbed when researching the
latest technologies and thinking about how to apply them at Wego. Recent breakthroughs in AI
systems are a particular focus for Veitch currently. Beyond his own venture, Veitch has also been
angel investing in the tech sector for more than two decades now and he enjoys working with and
advising other passionate entrepreneurs at both the initial startup phase and the later scale-up
phase.
He is a regular public speaker on topics of travel, tourism, aviation, technology and startups and a
regular on the travel and technology conference circuit. Veitch is a long serving board member of
the Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority (RAKTDA) and has been lucky enough to have a
ring-side seat to see tourism boom in the northern emirate.

Solid foundations

He is a veteran of the internet industry having established operations in Singapore for Yahoo! in
1998 where he led product and engineering teams and built out products across 40 verticals and
across 10 countries. Yahoo! in the early days was the most exciting company in tech and he
considers himself very fortunate to have been a part of that and to have worked with so many
amazingly talented people. After finishing up at Yahoo! and taking an extended break to do some
more traveling, Veitch and business partner Craig Hewett co-founded Wego and nearly 20 years
later they are still going strong.

Future of Middle East travel and tourism

Wego perfectly timed its move into the Middle East region to ride the online travel boom of the last
decade and it looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. Economies and populations are

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