Airalo, which offers affordable eSIM roaming packages for travelers, raised a $60M Series B led by e& Capital at a $250M post-money valuation
Travel is back on the agenda after a Covid-19 hiatus, and today a mobile startup out of Canada is announcing a healthy round of funding to capitalize on that.
Context & Ripple Effects
Airalo's $60M Series B lands in the middle of a sustained capital run at travel-tech companies: Hopper's $100M Series D in 2018, FLYR Labs' airline-pricing raise in 2021, and later mega-rounds at Flyr and group-payments player WeTravel all trace the same post-Covid travel-recovery funding curve.
What makes this round distinct is the buyer: lead investor e& Capital gives a carrier-affiliated backer a stake in a product that undercuts traditional roaming fees, and the bet aged well — Airalo went on to raise $220M at a $1B+ valuation two years later.
First-order effects
- Airalo gets the balance sheet to expand its eSIM destination coverage and operator partnerships ahead of the post-pandemic travel surge its own description points to.
- e& Capital secures early exposure to eSIM distribution at a $250M post-money entry price — an anchor position that preceded the company's unicorn-valuation round.
Second-order effects
- Carriers' high-margin inbound roaming revenue faces a new bypass channel: travelers buy local-network data through an app rather than paying home-operator rates, pressuring roaming pricing at the margin.
- Rival travel-infrastructure startups respond by scaling fast on the same thesis — Flyr layered debt onto equity and WeTravel quadrupled its valuation between rounds — keeping travel-tech valuations climbing together.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, connectivity becomes a software marketplace layered on carrier networks rather than a carrier-sold product, with aggregators like Airalo capturing the customer relationship and carriers competing for wholesale capacity underneath.
The trend: Post-Covid travel demand is pulling venture capital into travel infrastructure, with eSIM aggregation unbundling roaming from carriers the way earlier rounds unbundled booking and payments.