Skyscanner trio invest £350,000 in a new app that will help bring people together
A SOCIAL media app to help people arrange get-toget hers has secured investment from the three co-founders of Scottish travel search company Skyscanner, including chief executive Gareth Williams.
Decidz is based at CodeBase in Edinburgh – the UK’s largest tech incubator – and was set up in 2015 by two former Skyscanner executives including Mr Williams’ younger brother Tom.
The start-up, which has 10 staff, is understood to have secured initial funding of around £350,000 from investors including Mr Williams and his two co-founders, Bona my Grimes and Barry Smith.
“We’ve now got a team in place to develop our product and to continue growing the user base ,” said Tom Williams, 45. “We’re testing it out initially in Scotland and the UK, but then looking to develop it further in some of the major markets overseas such as the US and Asia.”
Mr Williams said he and Decidz co-founder and chief operating officer Craig Parker had set up the business to make it easier for friends and family to arrange to meet up.
“We found it became a pain when there were more than three people involved,” Mr Williams said. “We were fed up with the email ping pong and long chain of emails going backwards and forwards between a lot of people. We found details got lost, decisions didn’t get made and people invariably got left out of the loop. So we set out to create an app and website which addresses that.”
While other scheduling apps like Facebook events offered just a yes or no response to event suggestions, Mr Williams said Decidz was more collaborative and used conversations between friends to reach decisions on get-togethers.
The app will make suggestions such as meeting venues, earning small commissions on any bookings made.
Mr Williams previously set up and sold Europe’s largest ski hire broker Snowrental and also spent eight months at Skyscanner working on a social travel project. Mr Parker previously worked in operations for Skyscanner, which is one of Scotland’s two “unicorn” firms – tech start-ups with a valuation above $1 billion.
The company employs more than 700 people in 10 global offices including Beijing and Singapore and recorded 50 million visitors a month to its travel search sites last year. Last year underlying profits rose five per cent to £22 million on revenues up 28 per cent to £120m.
Bonamy Grimes was already a non-executive director of Decidz, having joined the board in 2015. He said: “We’re excited at the opportunity for Decidz to become a go-to app with the ability to transform how people organise their social activity in the 21st century. They have a small but worldclass team in place with the support of quality investors and advisers and we’re all pointed in the right direction when it comes to the potential of the product and its scalability.”
Former Skyscanner chairman Ray Nolan is also an investor. He said: “Decidz is solving a problem that has dogged the internet since people first discovered email. A simple get-together of more than a couple of people can take literally hours to organise.” Decidz plans to use the Edinburgh Festivals in August to showcase the product.