Amit Anand, managing partner of Jungle Ventures (pictured below right), believes Asia will be at the forefront of travel innovation in the years ahead and that the next wave of start-ups will be more innovative and disruptive.

Anand, who was among the first investors to take a bet on Travelmob and made its exit when HomeAway acquired 61% of the start-up, said, “We will see a lot of new innovative models coming out of travel in Asia, more than from the US. There’s a lot of activity in travel industry itself – people travelling, hotels being built, look at the success of AirAsia.”

He said he had seen some interesting models coming up such as visual search and a post-booking app. “Yes, there are start-ups in these spaces in the US but Asia is not far behind – the next wave of start-ups will be more innovative and disruptive.”

And the biggest disruption will come from mobile. “The whole broad search and travel booking is open for the taking in Asia – there is the potential for somebody to become the platform, the mobile first platform.

“Who will become THE travel brand on the mobile internet – could we see an Expedia.com borne out of mobile that will be bigger than Expedia?

“The mobile customer in Asia doesn’t know travel brands that well – their exposure is not to Expedia or Makemytrip, but Facebook or WhatsApp.”

Anand, who hails from Mumbai and has a technology enterprise background, set up Jungle Ventures in 2010 with a fund of US$5 million from “families and friends”. Today, its fund has grown to US$20 million and its average ticket size is between US$500,000 and US$2 million.

“Typically we lead mini series A rounds and gather investors around us. We are currently doing a round of US$3 million right now, and we are putting in US$500,000.”

The fund is interested in start-ups that can scale across Asia Pacific – hence it is less interested in traditional e-commerce which tend to be hyper-local. Travel, health care, digital, retail and payments are sectors that can scale.

In the area of payments, it is investing in a micro-lending platform which it believes can scale from India to markets like Indonesia and the Philippines.

It takes a hands-on approach to helping start-ups bridge that jump from “being bootstrap to proper company”. As such, it restricts its portfolio to three to five investments at a time.

Travelmob was its “first in, first out” – its first investment from the second fund and its first exit.

“They were by no means the first mover in the space – there were others like Roomorama, Wimdu, Tripvillas – but when we evaluated it, we knew the team understood how to scale regional businesses.

“We met them in March 2012 when they were launching their platform and we led the round, three to four months later, raising US$1 million.”

While there were “grey areas” in the home rental market, Anand was comfortable with that. “If you are looking for disruption, it cannot be as black and white as it ought to be. Skype violated a lot of telephony rules when it launched.”

Anand said he is a big believer in start-ups that tap into human emotion. “Travelmob taps into that very well – when we travel, we like to get away from reality and we look for environments where we can live the life we want to live – private homes, villas play well into that – better than hotels which offer cookie-cutter experiences.

“With tablets, search will become more visual.”

“Tapping into human emotion” is not typically something you hear a lot from investors and Anand laughs when I point that out. “Well, you can’t ignore numbers – you either create demand or tap into latent demand – and Asian start-ups don’t quite understand the creating demand part yet.”

HotelTonight is an example of a business that created demand – however Anand said the jury is still out on this model in Asia. “I am not sure I see enough consumers doing this and I am not sure of the demand and frequency of travel but who knows, time could change that – the key is, can they differentiate or create better content than what’s out there?”

Jungle Ventures is currently looking into two travel start-ups which he declined to name at this stage.

Note: Jungle Ventures will be one of the judges in the WIT Start-Up Pitch. Email your entries to: [email protected] – you have till September 10 to enter the competition that defines travel innovation in Asia.