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Hi there,

Last week, dirty secrets were exposed from one of Travel and Mobility Tech’s biggest startup prodigies. 

According to leaked information, Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments.

You’ll find more industry news in our Press Picks below, including the fact that airports are begging airlines to stop selling more summer tickets.

But first, enjoy some brand new research from the TNMT crew.

Today’s newsletter specs: 1,335 words or about 5:20 minutes of reading time.

Enjoy.
Lennart Dobravsky
Editor-in-Chief
 Research 

Winning the Attention Game

If you are a long-time TNMT reader, you are probably well aware that we explore unconventional data perspectives to unveil the hidden dynamics across the Travel and Mobility Tech ecosystem.

Here are a few past examples:
  • We applied Natural Language Processing to analyze the crucial topics discussed by banking analysts and the leadership of major airlines during 60 earnings calls.
  • We used web traffic data to illustrate how emerging bus companies, such as Flixbus, are competing with airlines, train and car-sharing providers.
  • With Google Maps’ free mobility data, we proxied returning travel demand across more than 130 countries.
  • We tracked mobility trends during the pandemic based on download figures of various mobile apps, resulting in the creation of the Go Out and Stay Home Index.
  • Finally, we analyzed 15,000+ airline reviews on TripAdvisor for an objective analysis on how to (finally) fix the air-travel experience.
Our latest analysis delves deeper into social media, specifically Twitter.

This is another important piece of the puzzle that allows us to further explore the ever-growing Travel and Mobility Tech ecosystem.
What exactly did we do?
Social media is a valuable tool for companies to build their brands, generate leads and establish direct relationships with global audiences of fans and followers.

A strong Twitter presence coupled with engaging content creation shared on a regular basis can empower marketers to grow their company’s footprint and perception.
  • Startups, in particular, rely on social media to garner attention, cut through the noise and make a splash online.
  • For early-stage companies with little revenue proof, a strong social media presence is imperative. This is helpful to raise Venture Capital as “visibility” is considered one of the most important currencies to impress investors.
In today’s analysis, we want to find out the current state of the TNMT ecosystem in the “attention war” on Twitter.

For this, we checked out the Twitter accounts of the top 100 most-funded companies of all time based on our proprietary TNMT company database. 

This includes current startups alongside companies that used to be startups but are now publicly-listed corporations.
  • Our analysis provides a sense of the long-term marketing winners and losers. 
  • We also share tips for startup founders and marketers on how to upgrade one’s company’s marketing strategies.
Here is a quick preview
We plotted all 100 companies of our TNMT sample into a framework, which is visualized below and shows an interesting segmentation.

As you can see, the segmentation allows us to identify a category of Hustlers.

These companies invested a significant amount of time and resources into sharing thousands of Twitter posts over the years to build an engaged audience of followers.

We believe that these companies should be examples for other travel and mobility brands to learn from.
If you’re interested in learning more about some of the concrete tactics they use, take a look at the full analysis.
 
Read in full
 Trends 

Update on the Remote-Work Revolution

For more than two years, people have been working largely from home and many professionals have been sold on the idea of permanent remote work—or at least minimal time spent in offices. 
  • When people are given the chance to work remotely, 87% of them take it. This dynamic is widespread across demographics, occupations, and geographies, according to a survey of 25,000 Americans by McKinsey and Ipsos
  • Nearly half of the 1,700 workers polled in a June survey by the Society for Human Resource Management said they would seek a remote position for their next job.
Here is the caveat
For many remote workers, flexible-work arrangements still have challenges.

These include limited access to reliable, high-speed internet, mental health challenges due to isolation at home, as well as a lack of proper software tools for fluent communication and collaboration with colleagues and clients.

The latter is particularly worrisome.

Without the right tools, it’s hard to do a good job. 

In fact, we would argue that we are still in the early innings of the virtualization of enterprise software.

As hybrid work has become the norm, all enterprise software will have to be reimagined to become simpler, real-time, collaborative and intelligent.

You might be wondering who the leading players are in this software revolution. 

If this is the case, feel free to re-visit our mapping of the 100 most promising startups offering virtual solutions that disrupt all kinds of physical interactions, including business travel.
But back to the topic at hand, how will the remote-work shift play out in the months to come?
Employers demand office presence
As a consequence of several remote-work hurdles, many companies appear to be pulling their workforces back into the office.
  • According to the Wall Street Journal, a lot of open positions are billed in job postings as remote but come with more ties to the office than suggested. For professionals set on remote work, this can mean a job search littered with false starts. 
  • Based on the latest LinkedIn data, remote job listings accounted for only 18.4% of paid job postings in May even though they attracted more than 50% of total applications. This is a solid indicator that demand for remote work is outstripping office-bound work.
It seems that employers and employees are eyeing different future work scenarios brought forth by the pandemic.

As a result, remote work appears to be settling into a kind of stasis,
according to Axios.

The figure of “teleworkers because of the pandemic” as a share of the total U.S. working population has leveled off at about 7-8% over the past few months.

These rates vary significantly based on the occupation. For instance, the rate for “Information” workers stands at about 20%, but this figure also hasn’t changed much in recent months.

Long story short:
  • For many workers, remote work looks like it's here to stay.
  • However, early pandemic prognostications about the impending death of office life were greatly exaggerated.
If you’re wondering which work activities will stay virtual for good, check out another analysis from last year.

We compared various virtual work use cases to predict their long-term viability by quantifying consumer and investor interest.
 Research 

State of Travel and Mobility Tech

New week, new teaser for our upcoming research report on funding dynamics.

As we previously reported, funding levels in Travel and Mobility Tech are down vis-a-vis 2021.

For the second quarter in a row, venture funding fell by more than 50% vs. last year’s figures. This is in line with general funding trends
across all sectors in startup land.
Here is a special highlight
There is one funding characteristic of the Travel and Mobility Tech environment that seems to be quite unique.

While later-stage investment activity has cooled off in most sectors, late-stage VC funding remains the dominant deal type in Travel and Mobility Tech.
  • As you can see below, the later-stage deal ratio has increased by more than 5 percentage points in H1 2022 compared to last year.
  • On the other hand, early-stage VC funding, including accelerator and seed stages, is currently trending below 2021 levels.
What does this mean?
We have an interesting hypothesis on why the ongoing late-stage focus potentially makes Travel and Mobility Tech more resilient going into the upcoming recession than most other verticals.

If you’re curious to learn more, sign up for our report’s waiting list.

 
Get on waitlist
 Press Picks 

Our Recommended Must Reads 

UBERGATE  A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.
 Read more by The Guardian  
AIRPORT CHAOS  London Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, has made the extraordinary move of asking airlines to stop selling tickets for outbound travel this summer.
 Read more by CNN
HYDROGEN FLYING  ZeroAvia’s hydrogen-powered test plane is nearly ready for takeoff. The California startup will fly its 19-seat prototype in the U.K. and U.S. this summer as the aviation industry searches for zero-emissions fuels.
 Read more on Canary Media  
ELECTRIC FLYING  Electric aviation is the next frontier in the movement of people and goodsAll-electric "seagliders" could someday offer fast, low-altitude flights in coastal communities like the Hawaiian Islands.
 Read more by Axios  
EVENTS RECOVERY – The floodgates have opened, and travel is back, but where have all the event attendees gone? A number of factors have grounded them and kept attendance well below pre-pandemic levels.
 Read more by Skift
HOTEL OF THE FUTURE – Technology innovations, changing customer demands, and new competitive threats are pushing hotels to offer increasingly personal, uniquely tailored experiences for every guest on every visit as Deloitte concludes in its latest Hotels of the Future report.
 Read more by Deloitte
 Deal Tracker 

Most Recent Venture Capital Deals

Merlin Labs – the US-based provider of autonomous driving technology has reportedly garnered $105M in Series B funding. The round was co-led by Baillie Gifford and Snowpoint, with participation by Google Ventures.

KKDay – the Taiwan-based OTA raised $20M in Series C+ funding from TGVest Capital. This brings the company’s total Series C funding, which originally raised $75M in 2020, to $95M.

Holibob – the digital marketing and distribution tool for travel brands and operators raised $12M in a deal led by Ryan Howsam, a follow-on investor active in the company’s previous (seed) round in 2021. 

Caravelo – the provider of subscription, revenue optimization, and customer service automation solutions for the airline and travel industry raised $3M in later-stage venture funding from Inveready Technology Investment Group and Sabadell Venture Capital. This brings the company’s total raised to more than $6M.

Urbvan – the provider of urban transit services using small-scale busses in Mexico City was acquired by Swvl, the UAE-based provider of urban bus transport in Egypt, Brazil, and Pakistan. Urbvan is the company‘s sixth acquisition in 2022 including the acquisition of Queen's Gambit Growth Capital in a reverse merger that took Swvl public in March 2022.

1000 Miles Travel Group – the Australian provider of travel management services was acquired by business travel incumbent CTM for close to $2M. This concludes the company’s fourth acquisition in 2022, all of which were active in the corporate travel management space.

TapTrip – the self-service business travel and expense startup founded in 2017 was acquired by TripStax, the business travel SaaS based in the UK, for an undisclosed sum.

Routerank – the platform for optimizing multi-modal personal transport was acquired by Netcetera, a provider of digital solutions across industries, for an undisclosed amount.

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