Bach, an app for planning bachelorette trips and group travel experiences, has announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital. The app, available on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store, is designed to help users plan a group trip with their friends from start to finish.
Launched in 2020, Bach aims to solve the hassle behind coordinating group travel by allowing groups to discover, plan and book trips all in one place. The app lets you invite your friends to plan an upcoming trip. From there, you can all chat about what you want to do and determine the best location for the trip based on costs and interests. Once you and and your friends have ironed out these details, you can put an itinerary together and then use the app’s expense-splitting feature to track all the costs of the trip. Bach also includes a marketplace that curates experiences near your destination that can be booked through the app.
Although Bach started as an app, the company is ready to go beyond mobile. The startup announced that it’s launching a new web marketplace that will allow users to book experiences starting next month. Bach CEO and co-founder Mike Petrakis told TechCrunch in an interview that the company believes it will be able to attract more users, beyond those looking to book bachelorette trips, by bringing its marketplace to the web.
“We’re opening up Bach to the internet,” Petrakis said. “Right now, you have to download the app if you’re going on a bachelorette trip and have to go through a few different steps to find the marketplace that we built. So the thought process was very simple: let’s put this on the internet. I believe that people will start gravitating towards us beyond bachelorette parties. If somebody wants to find a party bus to book in Nashville, it doesn’t have to be for a bachelorette party. Same goes for an ATV tour in Scottsdale or a brunch reservation in Vegas.”
The company currently provides local experiences in major U.S. travel destinations, including Scottsdale, Nashville and Las Vegas, and will be available in 30 cities by the end of Q1 2023. Examples of bookable experiences include private chefs, goat yoga, ATV excursions, party buses, yacht charters and more.
Image Credits: Bach
Petrakis says Bach is approaching 500,000 parties being planned in the Bach app and two million users to date. Over the past six months, the company has doubled the number of bookable experiences on its platform from 800 to over 1,600 and plans to reach 3,000 experiences in 2023.
As for the new funding, the company says it will be used to make strategic hires, and also set the groundwork for expanding the platform beyond bachelorette parties.
“We will be planting our roots for expansion beyond bachelorette parties with the funding,” Petrakis said. “The launch of Bach on web and getting us on the internet will be the first step toward doing this. The idea is two-fold: let’s dominate this space first and then let’s start to branch out to become the destination for any group that wants to go have fun on a weekend. We want to be the platform you think about when you want to book something fun.”
The funding round included participation from Corazon Capital, Freestyle VC, Oversubscribed Ventures and other institutional partners. The new investment brings the company’s total funding to $17 million. Bach raised $8 million in seed funding led by Corazon Capital last April.
“Millennial travel is a huge opportunity, and the future of travel, especially group travel, is changing quickly,” said Sonia Nagar, partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, in a statement. “Even though group travel is a $200 billion market, it remains challenging for consumers to coordinate in most cases. BACH is not only proving it can be the market leader and own the bachelorette vertical, but, by doing so, is also building the foundation to naturally unlock group travel broadly.”
Although bachelorette parties represent the company’s area of expertise and entrance into the group travel space, Petrakis says Bach has many options to expand its business, as people already use the app for girls trips, birthday trips, spring break trips and more.