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Out of Office Is Disrupting the Travel Industry—Here’s How the Co-Founders Allocated $4.6M in Fundraising

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Out of Office (OOO) is the latest app disrupting the travel and tourism sectors, going up against long-time industry leaders Expedia and Travelocity. Full of hidden gems, best-ofs, and hot tips, the recommendation app uses a different source pool than its competitors: your personal network. Sounds like a saving grace for your trip-planning group chat, right? Investors thought so, too.

The idea for OOO arrived when former Trunk club executives Jan Seale and Coabi Kastan were on a trip to London. After digging through google sheets, confirmation emails, and phone notes each day, the duo realized there had to be an easier way to organize and execute a group trip. The pair put a pin in the idea as they focused on growing their respective careers, but when travel halted in March of 2020, they had an inkling the tourism industry would boom at the first chance of travel. So they hit the ground running.  

Their gut instincts were right. In 2022, the global leisure travel market reached an estimated $645.3 billion and is expected to increase by 19 percent in the next five years. This global demand for wanderlust allowed the duo to raise $1.6 million during their pre-seed round in 2021 (backed by former colleagues at Cameo and Havenly). 

Typically, pre-seed funding goes towards putting a product’s vision in motion. Seale and Kastan nailed their brand vision in the early days of OOO's conception, but bringing it to life as a functional app would be tricky. “We had a great idea, and we had a team that was working for free on our beta. But it was so unique and different [that] we needed money to build something end to end,” says Seale, who also serves as CEO. She adds that the pre-seed money was key to finding and paying the right people to build out the app they envisioned. 

OOO’s seed round was an extension of that. By April 2022, they had built a quarter of the app’s functionality using pre-seed funds. “We needed more capital for a bigger team. We needed to invest in marketing and customer acquisition and on brand in order to continue to scale," Seale says. That month, the company closed a $3.5 million round of seed funding led by Hyde Park Venture Partners. 

While OOO has now raised close to $5 million, the odds were stacked against the two as minority and women co-founders. Female founders received just two percent of venture capital money in 2021, and Seale was among the first one hundred Black women to raise over a million dollars in venture capital with OOO's pre-seed round. “While it sounds like an accomplishment, with billions of venture dollars being deployed each year, it’s unfortunate that that number is so small," says Seale. "Both Coabi and I are committed to changing that dynamic and ensuring that more marginalized groups get access to venture capital."

Seale and Kastan are looking forward to their Series A next year.

Want to learn more about the future of Out of Office? Jan Seale and Coabi Kastan share their thoughts on the future of personalized travel, entrepreneurship, and app building on this week's episode of WorkParty.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE

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