Berlin-based travel booking service Omio raises $100M, bringing its total raised to ~$400M, and says it's eyeing potential M&A opportunities in the sector
Multimodal travel platform Omio (formerly GoEuro) has raised $100M in late stage funding to help see its business through the coronavirus crisis.
Context & Ripple Effects
Omio's raise closes a five-year funding arc: a $45M Series B led by Goldman Sachs in 2015, a $70M round led by Silver Lake Kraftwerk and Kleiner Perkins in 2016, and a $150M round led by Kinnevik and Temasek in 2018 had already put nearly $300M behind the Berlin company's play to aggregate air, rail, bus and car rental booking across Europe, as its 2019 profile noted.
What changes now is the framing: this $100M late-stage round is explicitly a bridge through the coronavirus collapse in travel bookings, and management says it intends to use its balance sheet for sector M&A — turning a survival raise into a consolidation weapon while rival booking assets are distressed.
First-order effects
- Omio gains the runway to keep operating its multimodal booking platform through the pandemic-era collapse in ticket sales, when competitors with thinner balance sheets cannot.
- Its stated M&A intent means distressed travel-booking assets in Europe now have one more well-funded buyer, shifting negotiating leverage toward Omio in any sale process.
Second-order effects
- Rival multimodal booking services face a competitor that can outlast the demand trough and acquire inventory or technology cheaply, pressuring them toward their own fundraising, exits, or consolidation.
- Investors who backed earlier GoEuro rounds — Goldman Sachs, Silver Lake Kraftwerk, Kleiner Perkins, Kinnevik, Temasek — are effectively doubling down on route-share aggregation, signaling to late-stage markets that scale in travel booking is being bought, not built.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, European travel booking emerges from the crisis concentrated around fewer, better-capitalized aggregator platforms that control access to rail, coach and air inventory — raising the bar for any new entrant needing both supply integrations and consumer reach.
- A consolidation wave led by survivors rather than incumbents would also reshape how transport operators distribute tickets, with platform intermediaries gaining pricing and placement power over carriers desperate for demand.
The trend: Crisis-era capital is concentrating European multimodal travel booking into fewer, larger aggregation platforms, with well-funded survivors like Omio buying scale through M&A rather than waiting for demand to return.