Culture Trip
Culture Trip is a global hyper-growth startup operating in travel, media and entertainment. We create stories that reveal what is unique and special about a place, its people and its culture.
In-house creative teams work with a global network of more than 300 freelance creators to produce location-based inspiration from around the world, including articles, videos, photography, illustration and animation.
Everyone working at Culture Trip is driven by a shared vision: to inspire people to go beyond their cultural boundaries and connect with the world around them. We want to bring the world to everyone and in doing so bring everyone closer together.
Culture Trip has been named by Forbes as one of the fastest-growing companies to watch.
The Culture Trip hypergrowth story
Dr Kris Naudts and a small team spent four years testing and evolving the concept of Culture Trip on a shoestring budget. Dr Naudts secured seed funding of $2 million in 2015 and began the work of producing inspirational content globally, including video, photography, animation and illustration. Series A funding was secured in late 2016 when PPF Group invested $20 million.
Since then, the startup has shown record-breaking growth: monthly unique visitors to the site have gone from 4 million to nearly 20 million, cross-platform social followers have increased from 1 million to 7 million, and app downloads have leapt from 50,000 to 1.5 million. Culture Trip videos have been viewed more than 2 billion times since late 2016.
A Series B funding injection from PPF of $80 million in April 2018 has further propelled rapid growth, allowing Culture Trip to hire key executives, launch a rebrand and lay the groundwork to ramp up revenue streams.
The global Culture Trip team
From just a dozen people in late 2016, the team has expanded to more than 250 members of staff. This diverse group of computer engineers and tech, editorial, data and media experts is spread across offices in London, New York City and Tel Aviv.
Alumni of companies including Google, Facebook, Expedia, Lonely Planet, Spotify, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, Viacom, CNN, TripAdvisor and the BBC have joined recently and there are more than 100 open positions across our engineering, editorial, commercial and marketing teams as we continue to hire to match our rapid growth.
Culture Trip also has a global network of more than 300 local content creators, who cover dozens of cities across the world. In-house creatives and a growing team of engineers, designers and data scientists work with this global network to produce inspiring stories for our site, app and social channels.
A diverse content offering
Culture Trip publishes over 1,600 articles every month on art, architecture, fashion, film and television, literature, food and drink, music, home and design, sports, technology, travel, and wellness. These are enhanced by original video, photography, illustration and animation across all our channels.
We offer highly creative, localised content, connecting travel inspiration with the ‘how to’, at a global scale. We aim to use creativity and storytelling to inspire people to get out and do things in more countries across the world. In the future, Culture Trip will launch further revenue streams including an online travel agency to connect its rapidly growing millennial audience with places to stay and things to do around the world.