Kenya’s Purple Elephant Ventures, A Startup Focused On Tourism, Grabs $1 Million

Purple Elephant Ventures (PEV) is a Kenyan-based venture studio with a focus on tourism looking to build the next generation of startups that employ technology in their efforts to modernize the tourism sector. This tourism-focused venture has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding and will use this investment to build at least four startups at the intersection of tourism, climate, and technology, annually. The startups had quite a number of investors participating, including Klister Credit Corp., a Canadian investment firm, The Untours Foundation, and a number of angel backers including Fede Pirzio-Biroli, founder of Playfair Capital; Ian McCaig, former CEO of lastminute.com and M-Kopa board member; Anthony Rock, president of Rock Impact Capital; Rich Hoops, executive director at Impact Capital; Jim Villanueva, managing director of Global Partnerships Social Venture Fund, and Helena Riese Harstad, co-founder and chair of the Optimizer Foundation.

The startup was founded in 2020 by Ben Peterson, Mikul Shah, and Vander Does Willebois. The startup was founded before Covid hit but this did not stop the founders from launching two startups; Elephant Bookings, a software as a service (SaaS) product, and Nomad.Africa, a content-to-commerce magazine. Elephant Bookings is a B2B product that brings hospitality providers online with the aim of helping them to increase their occupancy rates by allowing direct bookings. Nomad.Africa, on the other hand, was initially founded by Shah, who is also the founder of restaurant discovery site EatOut Africa. The venture studio is currently looking to fill the positions of co-founders and CEOs for the two startups.

“I think what’s exciting for the team is all of the possibilities to digitize tourism for a greener future. And one of the great advantages of working in a studio is that we get to play around with new innovative ideas all the time. We have what we call ideation sessions, where we have very structured conversations around examining the tourism industry from the perspective of building businesses that will help reduce the carbon footprint of Africa’s tourism industry,” CEO Ben Peterson said.

Explaining the focus on tourism, CEO Ben Peterson who is also the former senior partner at AHL Venture Partners, an early-stage VC in Africa said that “There are thousands of startups in agriculture, FinTech, energy, and health — all the major sectors of the African economy, but very few in tourism, and only a handful have raised capital. This is despite the fact that tourism is one of the largest sectors on the continent. 

“It sort of struck me as odd so I started looking into why that is the case, and at the end of the day I came to the conclusion that it is a massive industry with real margins but it is completely stuck in the 1970s in the way that it operates. Most tourism organizations barely have any online presence. You even go to the websites of the most expensive Safari lodges and you can’t even book a room. You have to email or call an agent and it takes multiple steps to actually make a booking,” he added emphasizing that Elephant Bookings is the solution to the first gap Purple Elephant Ventures saw in the market.

He also went on to add that a further inquiry into Africa’s tourism industry revealed that the continent was ripe for disruption especially because it is the fastest-growing continent. The tourism sector in Africa is expected to grow at 6.8%, double the rate of the continent’s overall economy, to hit $279 billion, over the next decade, as the industry makes a strong recovery from the effects of the covid pandemic, according to data from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), which also shows that 14 million new jobs will be created during that period. “I realized there’s an issue with modernization of this industry and we started to look at it a little bit further. And I quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn’t just one business opportunity to modernize the tourism sector. There were dozens of potential ways to do it,” CEO Ben Peterson said.