Product development and geographic expansion are on the schedule for Travelaer after it raised a €4.3 million funding round.

The money has come from lead investor Entrepreneur Venture and with Pleiade Venture also involved.

Existing backers Calypso Capital and Alderville also came back.

The company has raised 1.5 million in an early round since its launch in 2015.

The France-based business, headed by ex-Amadeus UEX expert Mike Slone, has created two main products: online booking and trip management platform, Travel Paas; and Comversational, a messaging platform that works on services such as Facebook.

Slone says:

“The travel industry has been forcing customers to book and manage travel online in the same way for the past 20 years.

“The big travel tech companies, which are focused more on transactions than customer experience, require airlines to adopt technology that leads their customers into unfortunate and unnecessarily bad digital experiences.”

One the company’s first customers was IcelandAir, in what was billed at the time as the first search and booking service for an airline on Facebook Messenger.