Vayant Travel Technologies Sold for USD 35 Mln

Vayant Travel Technologies, a Bulgarian-based company, was sold for US 35 million to US PROS Holdings. Vayant is registered in the United States but is created by Bulgarians and currently almost the entire team of nearly 90 employees is based in Sofia. The company has offices and dealers in both London and Singapore.

Vayant provides airlines with a SaaS (software as a service) platform. The company’s platform for processing of large volume of airline data enables carriers to apply an individual algorithm for pricing and offering to end-customers of an up-to-date ticket price, which includes all pricing factors and related services. This enables operators to keep control over distribution which is major part of their business, instead of outsourcing this service to another company. There are only three companies in the world that provide such solution to air carriers, one of them being the Internet giant Google.

Vayant Travel Technologies was set up in 2007 and was entered at the very beginning by the first Bulgarian venture capital fund NEVEQ. In 2010, Vayant already had a product which attracted the attention of another investment fund, Cape Capital, and the Bulgarian team appointed French Eric Dumas executive director, to bring the company to market. Shortly thereafter, Vayant’s first customer, AirBaltic Airline, appeared. In 2014, the Company also attracted German air giant Deutsche Lufthansa as investor. It continued to grow by a 30% increase in turnover annually.

Vayant’s buyer PROS Holdings is a US company based in Houston, Texas. Its business focuses on personalized b2b cloud software for e-sales. With the acquisition of Vayant, its market capitalization amounts almost to USD 852 million. The new owner plans to expand the company’s business in Bulgaria. Thus, the office in the capital with developers and engineers has the potential to become the second European center of the three-continent PROS.

The 100% acquisition of Vayant can be described as the third major acquisition (over USD 10 million) of a Bulgarian IT company by a foreign buyer in recent years, along with Telerik and Fadata. This successive sale of a Bulgarian IT company is yet another proof of the great potential of the engineering ecosystem in Bulgaria that generates innovative solutions open to the world.