Trip-planning platform BACH just raised a $9M Series A quickly after its seed

Last spring, entrepreneur Mike Petris struck out to raise a seed round for his tech-enabled solution for a billions-and-growing industry: bachelorette parties.

The timing was right. BACH — a platform that allows users to share plans, run polls, create a shared itinerary, track and split expenses, and host a central group chat with all attendees of a bachelor or bachelorette trip — raised an $8 million seed round. The startup was picking up steam in 2022, as travel-related pandemic restrictions were lifted, and millions of pandemic-era weddings were rescheduled.

And the company just raised again, it announced Thursday. This time, it was a $9 million Series A, led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital with a follow-on investment from Corazon Capital, Freestyle VC and Oversubscribed Ventures. The raise was only a million more than its seed a year ago, following a trend of more conservative raises and down-rounds following a stellar year of fundraising between 2021 and 2022.

“Millennial travel is a huge opportunity, and the future of travel, especially group travel, is changing quickly,” said Sonia Nagar, a partner at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, in a statement. “Even though group travel is a $200 billion market, it remains challenging for consumers to coordinate in most cases. BACH is not only proving it can be the market leader and own the bachelorette vertical, but, by doing so, is also building the foundation to naturally unlock group travel broadly.”

The BACH app. (Courtesy image)

The company said it would be using the raise to launch BACH on the web, as it plans to expand into more general group travel. The company also offers booking options for trip experiences, and aims to expand its marketplace from its current 800 experiences to more than 3,000 by the end of the year.

“BACH makes it easy and fun to organize all the details of group travel and helps groups find the best ‘things to do’ on their trips,” said Petrakis, BACH’s founder and CEO. “This new round of funding is going to help us deliver even more fun to our users by expanding our bachelorette party experiences.”

Since the company’s founding in 2020, more than 500,000 parties have been planned on the app, BACH said, and it will be operating in 30 US cities by the end of the month.

When Technical.ly checked in last year, the company had 16 full-time staff, but that’s grown to 32. It recently hired its director of finance from SeatGeek and its head designer from the founding team at Grubhub. Some of the team is based here in Philadelphia, but it also includes distributed members.

The company said its web platform is expected to launch in April, a move to broaden their base and make experiences easier to book.

“Our hyper-focus over the past few years has helped us deeply understand the needs of bachelorette parties,” Petrakis said. “We’re excited to expand our bachelorette offerings and to lay the groundwork to make other types of group travel just as fun and seamless in the future.”