Bach, the app for planning bachelorette parties and group travel, raises $9 million

Image sources: Bach

Bach, an app for planning bachelorette parties and group travel experiences, announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital. Available on the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, the app aims to help users plan group outings with friends from start to finish.

Founded in 2020, Bach aims to solve the problems behind group travel coordination by enabling groups to discover, plan and book trips in one place. The app allows you to invite your friends to plan an upcoming trip. From there, everyone can chat about what they want to do and determine the best location for their trip based on cost and interests. Once you and your friends have these details sorted out, you can put together an itinerary and then use the app’s cost-sharing feature to keep track of all the costs of your trip. Bach also includes a marketplace that aggregates experiences near your destination that can be booked through the app.

Although Bach started as an app, the company is ready to move beyond mobile. The startup has announced that it will launch a new online marketplace that will allow users to book experiences starting next month. Bach CEO and co-founder Mike Petrakis told TechCrunch that the company believes that by expanding its marketplace online, it will be able to attract more users beyond those looking to book bachelorette parties.

“We’re opening Bach to the Internet,” Petrakis said. “Right now you have to download the app if you’re going on a bachelor trip and go through eight different steps to find the marketplace we’ve built. So the thought process was very simple: put this on the Internet. I believe that people start to be attracted to us beyond bachelorette parties. If you’re looking to book a party bus in Nashville, it doesn’t have to be for a bachelorette party. The same goes for an ATV ride in Scottsdale or brunch in Vegas.

The company currently offers local experiences in major US travel destinations, including Scottsdale, Nashville and Las Vegas, and will be available in 30 cities by the end of the first quarter of 2023. Bookable experiences include, for example, private chefs, goat yoga, ATV tours, and party buses. , yacht charter and more.

Image sources: Bach

According to Petrakis, Bach is approaching 500,000 parties planned on the BACH app, with two million users projected to date. Over the past 6 months, the company has doubled the number of bookable experiences on its platform from 800 to over 1,600 and plans to reach 3,000 in 2023.

As for the new funding, the company says it will be used for strategic hiring and also lays the groundwork for expanding the platform beyond bachelor parties.

“With the support, we are taking root in expanding beyond bachelorette parties,” Petrakis said. “The release of Bach on the Internet and our access to the Internet will be the first step towards this. The idea is twofold: first we dominate this space and then we start branching out to become a destination for any group that wants to have fun on a weekend. We want to be the platform you think of when you want to book something fun.”

Corazon Capital, Freestyle VC, Oversubscribed Ventures and other institutional partners participated in the financing round. With the new investment, the company’s total financing reaches 17 million dollars. Last April, Bach raised $8 million in seed funding led by Corazon Capital.

“Millennial travel is a huge opportunity, and the future of travel, especially group travel, is changing rapidly,” Sonia Nagar, partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, said in a statement. “Although the group travel market is a $200 billion market, alignment remains a challenge for consumers in most cases. BACH not only proves that it can be a market leader and can own the vertical of girl mining, but also creates the basis for the wide opening of group travel.”

Although bachelorette parties are the company’s specialty and entry into the group travel space, Petrakis says Bach has many opportunities to grow her business, as people are already using the app for girls’ trips, birthday trips, spring breaks, and more.