88mph breaks silence, announces investment in flight booking app

Investment company 88mph, has announced its investment in Ahoy, a flight booking and management app for small businesses. The announcement came via a post on LinkedIn, written my 88mpb Founder, Kresten Buch.

It did not state how much was invested in the startup.

The investment in Ahoy

In the announcement, Buch states that 88mph had trouble over the past few years when travelling around Africa. These issues came from problems with travel agents, flight changes and cancellations, and fraud flagging, among others.

“This is of course not only an African problem, but managing travel around and into Africa for teams, with last minute needs, not to mention credit card issues, are on a different level for these markets so we believe the need is even greater here,” writes Buch.

Due to these issues, Ahoy was founded by one of 88mph’s former programme managers, Sylvia Brune. It is also co-founded by Bartosz Hernas and Michał Hernas.

“We have followed Ahoy’s product development over the past year, growing user base, and being able to support the 24/7 needs of expansion teams from major companies in Africa and Central Europe.”

“With this demonstrated ability to deliver value to customers, and build revenue, we decided to go in with an investment to help them grow further,” continues Buch.

88mph breaks its silence

It has been a while since 88mph announced anything new. In June 2015, the company published a blog post on its website, stating that the company would be taking a break from investments.

“In the next 18-24 months, we will focus on working with the companies we have all ready [sic] funded to get some good return for our investors and founders.”

“So, if you are a startup looking for funding in these markets, then we will unfortunately not be able to help you at the moment.”

In the Ahoy investment announcement, Buch reiterated this by saying: “Going forward we only look at startups who are slightly later stage as we don’t have the time resources necessary to invest in very early stage startups at this point.”

Ventureburn has reached out to 88mph and Ahoy on the announcement and will update the piece accordingly.