The business<\/a>, which has been based in Sydney co-working space Fishburners for the past three months, has just taken on its first paying customer and is looking to scale with the addition of IT and sales staff.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rezdy, a shortened version of \u201creservation ready\u201d, is a real-time booking system for tours and activities operators.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The operators are given access to Rezdy\u2019s back-end software, which allows them to book in and manage customers instantaneously. Rezdy\u2019s pricing plan currently requires businesses to come on board for six months, at $19 a month.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The start-up was founded by French-born entrepreneur Simon Lenoir and currently has a four-strong team.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lenoir secured the $250,000 seed investment, for an undisclosed equity stake, via the Sydney Angels network. Grand Prix Capital, which provided the funds, is headed by entrepreneur Les Szekely.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Rezdy failed to get through the \u201cdeal screening\u201d round when pitching, but managed to attract the interest of Grand Prix Capital due to its existing stake in Siteminder, which has a similar business model but is aimed at hotels.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mike Ford, the managing director of Siteminder which is itself currently undertaking a $5M raising, is acting as an advisor to Rezdy.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lenoir says the business provides a similar service as online hotel and airfare booking services, but for the more \u201cfragmented\u201d tours and activities sector.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would be silly if you went to FlightCentre and asked for a flight to Europe and they said \u2018Yes, sure, I\u2019ll get back to you in three days,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cBut that is what happens with tours, if you\u2019re a dive centre in Thailand, for example.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are thousands of small businesses this will appeal to. We consider ourselves a B2B service because we will then connect these businesses to the likes of Expedia and Red Balloon via the software.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lenoir says he hopes to have 100 paying customers by March, with 1,500 signed up by the end of the year, prior to international expansion.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a great opportunity in Europe, which is where we will direct ourselves, but there is still a lot of work to do here in Australia first,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rezdy, a six-month-old web start-up, has secured $250,000 in funding from Grand Prix Capital ahead of an ambitious global growth<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35452"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}