Five women. Sixteen travel tech startups. One mission.
That is how I would sum up my conversation with Community and Investment Manager at Amadeus Ventures in the Asia Pacific, Stephanie Strunk.
Cited as one of the women to watch in the startup industry in APAC, she was the best person to talk about women in VCs, startups, and travel tech.
Strunk first joined Amadeus Asia Pacific in 2012 and has primarily held roles in Corporate Strategy and Business Development. She has been working with the travel tech startup scene in APAC since 2015, supporting seed stage companies with tech building, expert advice, market access, and funding referrals.
Amadeus has been honing its craft to support the travel business for over 30 years now; they launched Amadeus Next five years ago to help travel tech startups with funding and support. Today, it has extended as Amadeus Ventures with “more skin in the game”.
As an early stage investor for startups sitting at the crossroads of technology and travel, it provides funding, industry expertise, technology, and customer reach to its portfolio companies, executing business ideas that will, directly and indirectly, improve the experiences of travellers.
Also Read: Amadeus Ventures to invest in high potential early-stage startups across APAC
While traditional VCs focus on ROI, Amadeus Ventures –led by five women across the globe– is looking beyond the financial value and seek strategic value to help the parent company fill gaps in their tech offering in the B2B travel space.
More power to women
Strunk is the entry point for travel tech startups in APAC. In her journey so far she says, “finding a female founder in travel tech has been very rare.” Startups with at least one female founder tend to raise more in venture capital funding in later stage rounds (third and fourth), than companies with all-male teams (21 per cent more), she adds.
Gender diversity in the travel workforce is not so skewed as 50 per cent of the global workforce is female. But it is balanced only at the entry-level and thins out as one goes up the ladder, says Strunk.
“If you don’t have a diverse representation of both the genders how will you address the needs of your customers?” she exclaims.
While at Amadeus, about 75 per cent of the business units are led by women, there is scope for improvement in the VC world overall. And she believes in addition to the historic gender imbalance, lack of confidence in women is to be blamed for this disparity.
Women in the workforce need some support to feel confident and this she believes can come from both men and women in the workforce. It could, in fact, be as simple as providing comfort, praise, feedback, etcetera. “But it is definitely important to know what you are good at to start with,” says Strunk.
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She emphasises that external view on how we are is important, but so is internal and we can do so by “getting comfortable with the uncomfortable”.
Working in the startup space is all about the brand, networking and finding opportunities to grow. “It’s all about the personal brand” she adds.
The ratio of women at tech conferences is 4:1, Strunk says. She notes that speaking opportunities have helped her grow and gain exposure. It was Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In that led her to seek more speaking opportunities.
The Amadeus Women’s Network’s event in Bangkok
In addition to working on oneself, it is fruitful to have programmes and initiatives to help women build social and business credibility. It should be a collaborative effort and we should have “more women to support women.”
She was quick to note about the Amadeus Women’s Network, an employee-led support group has helped them share best practices at Amadeus. The network also led to the development of a powerful mentoring tool.
APAC focussed
The all-women team at Amadeus Ventures is working with 16 travel tech startups from across the globe, including BookingPal, FLYR, Betterez, Avuxi, Crowdvision, Situm, Volantio, Dawex, Pana, Refundit; and Strunk is leading the pack in APAC.
Five years ago, travel tech in Asia was in its infancy and since then has made lots of progress. Increasing purchasing power and budget flights have contributed to the travel boom in Southeast Asia (SEA). With India and China becoming rich inbound markets from smaller and more tourism-dependent countries in SEA such as Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines; travel tech startups emerged rapidly.
According to Google’s e-Conomy SEA 2019 report, more than US$37 billion of capital has flowed into the internet economy over the last four years.
Also Read: Amadeus is expanding Amadeus Ventures across APAC to support travel startups
While the majority has gone to e-commerce and ride-hailing unicorns, over US$7 billion in investment funding went to more than 3,000 internet economy startups in the last four years in Southeast Asia. China is also driving ahead of Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States on venture capital dollars invested into startups.
Travelution, a report released by Vynn Capital recently, says that 2019 saw an all-time high of 159 acquisitions and funding activity in the travel tech space while Asia led the number of capital raising with 54 per cent.
Recognising this potential, Amadeus is expanding Amadeus Ventures across APAC in Q1 of 2020. Strunk adds, “APAC is the region for growth and we see a lot of opportunities. The market is diverse and we are paying close attention to Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia.”
“We initially wanted to build a community to support travel tech in Asia which was not as evolved as North America or Europe. There are a lot of pain points in the travel industry in Asia which we want to solve and a copy-paste solution won’t cut it,” says Strunk.
Also Read: Amadeus Ventures to invest in high potential early-stage startups across APAC
She emphasises on the need for greater localisation in Asia and adapting to local market needs as a recipe for success in the APAC region.
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Image Credit: Amadeus Ventures
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