February was an exciting month for us. We came back after three exciting days at SATTE 2016 and soon after, we hosted the first Startup Knockdown successfully in association with OTM Mumbai and are now looking forward to the next one in Mumbai. This month also saw some major investments in travel space. Like always, we also learned about some really interesting travel startups and shared them with you. In case you missed, here are our top stories from this month:

#1- Fxkart and Tramily emerge as winners at first Travel Startup Knockdown

In the first Travel Startup Knockdown, Fxkart was selected to be the winner by our panel of judges. Fxkart simplifies the process of foreign exchange for international travellers by connecting them to reliable forex dealers. Tramily was picked as people’s choice at Startup Knockdown. It is a platform that connects travel agents to hoteliers easily through a website or mobile app.

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#2- ibibo group to receive USD 240 million funding from Naspers

ibibo, the parent company of popular OTA Goibibo will be receiving a funding of USD 250 million from existing stakeholder Naspers. The group not only operates the popular OTA but also runs B2B travel platform TravelBoutiqueOnline, bus booking service Redbus and budget hotel chain Gostays. The latest funds will be used by the company to develop new technologies to enhance the products.

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#3- Zendrive raises USD 13.5 million to make car travel safer

Zendrive offers analytics on the driving patterns to offer a quality score. It doesn’t require any hardware and relies on the sensors in mobile phone of the driver to generate the data. Zendrive is available through SDK and can be embedded with various apps. The technology holds huge potential and the participation of major automobile companies in this round is a strong indicator of the same.

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#4- Shouut is the only app you will need for local discovery

In a time when we have a separate app for everything from discovering activities to booking hotels, Shouut comes in as one app that has it all. It seamlessly stiches together food & drink, nightlife shopping, leisure & outdoor and travel & stay giving the user an app that has it all. Giant Tech Labs, the company behind this interesting product has recently raised seed funding of USD 500K to further develop the product.

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#5- Softbank confirms the acquisition of ZO Rooms by OYO Rooms

Softbank finally put the rumours of the acquisition of ZO Rooms by OYO Rooms by confirming the same. Tiger Global backed ZO Rooms was the strongest competitor to OYO Rooms but was facing challenges after failing to raise subsequent rounds from its investors. The deal went through with ZO Rooms founders and investors getting 7 percent stakes in OYO Rooms.

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#6- Phocuswright MD, Tony D’Astolfo talks about their first event in India

Phocuswright is coming to India for the very first time with the theme “The Asian Mojo: Millennials, Mobile, Money, Mania”. We spoke with Tony D’Astolfo, MD, Phocuswright to learn more about the highly anticipated event and the driving factors behind it.

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#7- Volvo plans to redefine car rental industry with its keyless technology

The Swedish car manufacturer Volvo has showcased a new keyless technology that eliminates the need of carrying any kind of car keys and allows unlocking the car using mobile phone. The digital keys can be shared with other users so that the cars can spend more time on the road than sitting in a parking lot. They will be launching a pilot project next year with their rental company Sunfleet.

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The post February 2016 round-up: The best in travel and web appeared first on TravHQ.

Thanks to the rapid growth in transportation sector, the number of vehicles on the roads is going up fast. With this, road safety is also an increasing concern, especially in India. Zendrive is a startup that tries to address the car safety issue by offering analytics on how the drivers are doing and it has recently raised USD 13.5 million in Series A funding. The funding round has been led by Sherpa Capital’s Shervin Pishevar and saw participation from Fontinalis Partners, BMW I Ventures, First Round Capital, Tad Montross, Thomvest Ventures and Nyca Partners.

To track the data of drivers, Zendrive doesn’t rely on any dedicated hardware. Instead it uses the data from multiple sensors on the mobile devices of drivers. So not only can it track location but also other factors like acceleration, braking, swerving and usage of phone and then puts these bits of information together to provide actionable insights. Using data from mobile phones is a very smart way of tracking the drivers as third party devices don’t see very strong rate of adoption.

Zendrive is available for developers to include as a part of their own app through an SDK. So it can be embedded with different apps and find many use cases. It can be used by commercial fleets, cab aggregators, self-drive rentals, valet services, roadside assistance and for driver training. Some apps that are already using Zendrive’s services are eDriving and Valet Anywhere.

Previously the company has raised USD 1.5 million in seed funding but the valuation remains undisclosed after the latest round. With more funds at disposal, the company plans to add new features and make its collision detection feature available to more people. The interest of BMW and Ford (through Fontinalis Partners) indicates that the technology is very promising and might find its way into cars of the future.

You can find more details about Zendrive here.

The post Zendrive raises USD 13.5 million to make travelling in car safer appeared first on TravHQ.