Online trip planning startup mygola raises $1.5M Series A led by Helion Venture Partners

Mygola Inc, the company that owns and operates customised online trip planning portal mygola with a crowd-sourced backbone, has secured $1.5 million in Series A round of funding led by Helion Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Blumberg Capital, the company announced in a blog post.

Mygola, which has an office in Maryland in the US besides Bangalore, will use the capital to expand its presence to Silicon Valley.

As part of the deal, Helion's senior MD Ashish Gupta joined the Board of mygola. We have contacted the company for more details, and will update the story.

Founded in 2009 by Anshuman Bapna and Prateek Sharma, both IIT Bombay alumnus, mygola follows a question-and-answer model for information-sharing and working out travel arrangements. It provides each registered user with a personal travel planner who does all the necessary research and makes bookings for trips.

In December 2011, the company had secured $1 million from 500Startups founder Dave McClure, Blumberg Capital and a few angel investors.

"Now travel is a tough segment, and travel planning is even worse. It is a fundamentally hard technical problem and often the rewards accrue only to those who manage to be close to the transaction. As a team, we've lived, breathed, ate and dreamt travel planning for over three years now. We threw out our first iteration and now after months of staying under wraps, we now have a product that I think is a technical and design tour-de-force," the company said in the blog post.