GoEuro, a travel search engine that compares and combines air, rail, bus and car rental options across Europe, announces $45M Series B led by Goldman Sachs
Context & Ripple Effects
This $45M Series B is an early rung on what becomes one of Europe's most heavily funded consumer-travel ladders: Goldman Sachs leads here, and the follow-on cadence in related coverage is unusually steep — a $70M round led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers less than a year later, then $150M in 2018 once the company has grown into a 36-country ticketing business under the Omio name.
By 2020, the Forbes profile pegs cumulative funding near $300M, and the company closes another $100M for a total of roughly $400M while explicitly signaling appetite for sector M&A. The significance of the Goldman-led round is that it marks the point where a US bulge-bracket bank bets on a Berlin startup whose core thesis — comparing air, rail, bus and car rental in one interface — was still unproven at scale.
First-order effects
- GoEuro gains capital to expand its combined air-rail-bus-car-rental search across Europe, with a Goldman Sachs lead lending institutional credibility that de-risks its next fundraise.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent multi-supplier booking startups — Tourlane raised $24M months later to solve exactly the cross-supplier coordination problem — must compete against a rival whose per-round checks are several times their entire raise.
Third-order effects
- If the funding escalation holds, European travel booking consolidates around one well-capitalized aggregator: Omio's later ~$400M war chest and stated M&A ambitions position it to absorb rather than merely outcompete smaller national and modal operators.
The trend: European multimodal travel booking is consolidating into a single VC-backed aggregator, with each successive round scaling GoEuro/Omio from search engine to potential acquirer.