Profile of Omio, formerly GoEuro, a Berlin-based website and app for booking travel across Europe that has raised nearly $300M in VC funding
This article is the first in a new series: World of Forbes, a collection of stories from our 35 licensed editions and global partners around the planet.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2019, Omio had climbed from a 2015 search engine comparing air, rail, bus and car rental options to a booking platform selling ground and air tickets across dozens of countries, funded by a $45M Series B led by Goldman Sachs, a $70M round, and a $150M round led by Kinnevik and Temasek that brought its haul near $300M. Forbes chose it as the launch story for its World of Forbes series, signaling the company as a flagship of the licensed-editions network.
What makes the profile more than a feature is where the trajectory went: a further $100M raise in 2020 took total funding to roughly $400M with explicit M&A ambitions, and by 2022 Uber was testing train and coach bookings in the UK powered by Omio's inventory across 1,000+ providers.
First-order effects
- Omio enters the profile with tier-one backers (Goldman Sachs, Kinnevik, Temasek, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, Kleiner Perkins) and capital depth its smaller European rail and bus ticketing rivals lack, letting it buy inventory coverage rather than build it provider by provider.
Second-order effects
- Superapps become a distribution channel instead of a threat: Uber's UK test plugs Omio's 1,000+ provider inventory into ride-hailing traffic, paying Omio as a supplier while keeping Uber out of the ticketing operations business.
Third-order effects
- If consolidation proceeds, Europe's fragmented ground-transport ticketing stacks up into an aggregator layer controlled by one or two capitalized platforms — with Omio's own stated M&A appetite pointing toward it being the consolidator rather than the acquired.
The trend: European multimodal travel booking is consolidating around heavily funded aggregator platforms whose inventory increasingly powers other consumer apps rather than only their own.