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14 I Companies & Markets bne June 2017 global so some disruptions are happening every day in some part of the world... and we are doing things very much on a large enough scale that this has become a stable number – we can predict each month how much we need to pay for this guarantee.”
For now, Dlouhy says the biggest test is trying to properly man- age the company’s exponential growth, which saw revenues grow 1,500% in 2015 to the point where the company is already in profit. The number of employees has also risen to over 1,100 as it offers 24/7 customer support now in 32 languages.
China of course is a huge market it is looking to expand into, and Dlouhy will be part of a delegation that will accompany the Czech president, Milos Zeman, on his next trip to Beijing – a sign of how favourably the Czech government regards
its new player in the global travel market. Dlouhy himself appeared in the Financial Times’ “New Europe 100” list of Cen- tral and Eastern Europe’s brightest and best people in 2016.
But over the next five years, what keeps Dlouhy, who with 27% of the company is already a very rich young man, motivated is the chance to be at the forefront of new developments in the travel industry. “I still see lots of issues in the travel segment which need to be fixed. It’s not just the transportation from A to B; it’s about offering the right services to the right people at the right time – it’s the personalisation of travel,” he says.
That means offering more flights at better prices on more routes, while also integrating ground transport into the algorithm, so that one leg of the trip can be by air, the second
Robots lead Russian start-up invasion of Dublin’s Silicon Docks
Jason Corcoran in Dublin
Agrowing number of Russian start-ups involved in everything from robotics to gaming are fuelling Dublin’s fast-growing start-up scene.
Some of these have been relocated from Moscow using funds and resources provided by an Irish government agency, while others have spun out of the Dublin operations of US tech giants such as Google and Facebook.
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leg by train and the final leg by coach. Integrating ground transport is especially important for itineraries that mix flights on incumbent carriers with those on budget carriers, which famously use less-congested secondary airports in metropoli- tan regions like Ciampino Airport for Rome, Beauvais for Paris and Charleroi for Brussels to keep costs down. So you can fly into Charleroi on Ryanair, then leave Belgium on Lufthansa from Brussels Airport.
Dlouhy also regards himself as a ‘blue sky thinker’ on the travel industry through his constant travelling using Kiwi.com. “I’ve many ideas such as how to sort out the issue of delayed luggage once and for all,” he says. “Imagine that you are departing in two days, so you pack your bag and the next day a courier rings your bell and takes your luggage, and when you arrive at your hotel destination it’s there – no hassles, no checking in of bags.”
All these ideas will take money to implement. In late
2013, Kiwi.com received €500,000 of investment from a part of the venture capital group Touzimsky Kapital for a 22% stake, followed by €1mn of investment in 2015 by Ondrej Tomek, the co-founder of the second-largest Czech search engine and a successful e-commerce investor, for a 10% stake.
“We are not necessarily looking for external financing – in fact, if you’d asked me six months ago, I’d have definitely said no. But after digging deeper into all the opportunities I actually see some opportunities that would be really hard to fund our- selves, so we are open to negotiations, but it’s all about the fit with the partner – money is always secondary, we need to find partners which can support us in other ways,” Dlouhy says.
Private capital from the US, Russia and Ireland is now helping to underpin funding from the Competitive Start Fund, an ini- tiative by the government agency Enterprise Ireland, which is luring “waves” of programmers and developers from Russia.
Enterprise Ireland provides Russian firms with support to secure visas and accommodation as well as mentoring after they decide to move to the Irish capital, known as the Sili-