Bangalore: Bangalore-based travel planning service mygola has raised $1 million in seed funding from Blumberg Capital, Dave McClure, and other angel investors Lewis Cheng, Mac Harman, Priyant Bhartia, Sandeep Bapna, Aldo Monteforte and Alvaro Gutierrez. The company plans to use the funds to build the product, and continue hiring Guides.

mygola is a service which provides users with their own personal travel planners, who do all the research and bookings for the customer’s trip. The first few answers to the customer’s queries are provided free, after which the users have to subscribe to annual and trip-based plans. The company also generates revenues by doing bookings for the users who want additional convenience. It brings together several travel enthusiasts and makes them travel researchers, to provide a travel website. mygola tries to combine the high touch of a human with the power of the web to bring together the best of both worlds.

Talking about the marketing strategy, Anshuman says, “Distribution is a key challenge in travel. What we are building at mygola is complementary to almost everything out there. We would like to work with boutique hotels who would like to offer a virtual concierge service and OTAs that care about engagement.”

mygola was founded by Anshuman and claims to connect human guides with users. Prior to founding mygola, Anshuman Co-Founded and was the Board Member of Democracy Connect, Strategic Partner Manager at Google, and the Engagement Manager at Deloitte Consulting. He was the Manager, Professional Services at Stratify. Anshuman was the Co-Founder and the Managing Director at RightHalf Software. He did his B.Tech, Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay, and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Talking about the competitors, Anshuman says, “Our biggest challenge is to scale up the human operations to a point where we can give millions of travelers their own personal travel planner. We have made some path breaking progress in that and currently hadbe 1000 guides, with 80 new guides being added every week.”

Dave McClure is a venture capitalist and the founding General Partner at 500 startups. It is an internet seed fund and startup accelerator program in California. Dave has invested in over 100 startups, including SlideShare, Credit Karma, Wildfire Interactive, and many more.

Blumberg Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm which focuses on innovative and disruptive digital and social media, SaaS/Technology enabled services, mobile technology, and Internet companies. It is a lifecycle investor and seeks to invest between $ 250,000 and $ 2.5 million.

Online travel is a $100 billion market in U.S. alone. We think travel planning has been fundamentally broken category for over a decade and the opportunity worldwide is in billions of dollars.