Halifax’s Trip Ninja Shuts Down
HALIFAX — Halifax startup Trip Ninja is ceasing operations.
The company announced its decision late on September 8, saying the pandemic and its impact on the travel industry has taken a toll.
In a LinkedIn post, Trip Ninja co-founder and CEO Andres Collart said the company’s business model made it tough to keep going with so few people booking flights.
“With the length of the pandemic and our heavy focus on multi-destination travel we believe it’s in the best interest of all stakeholders to cease active development,” he wrote.
Trip Ninja is an online platform that helps travel agents book complex flight itineraries faster, using machine learning. Collart, along with fellow Dalhousie University students Brett Ziegler, Rob Dumont, and Julieta Collart, founded the business in 2015.
They originally conceived of it as a way to help travellers find the cheapest flights for multi-city trips. They later pivoted to the B2B market, focusing more heavily on travel agencies.
The company found some success early on and was accepted into both the Volta Cohort and Propel ICT Programs.
Martha Casey, the CEO of Volta, tells Huddle that Collart has been an integral part of Atlantic Canada’s startup ecosystem.
“Andres is such a fantastic founder and he’s also such a strong leader in the startup community,” she said.
She said that, with the relationships he’s built and the mentoring he’s done, Collart has become a “really important part of what we do at Volta and how that community works.”
“He’s very dedicated to building a strong company, but also the success of his team and his colleagues,” Casey added.
Casey attributed Trip Ninja’s folding more to the state of the travel industry than any inherent problems with the company. The fact that they lasted for 18 months, being in the travel industry, is itself a remarkable achievment, she said.
But the last 18 months don’t appear to have been easy on the company.
In October 2020, Trip Ninja redesigned its platform and pivoted from serving online customers to focus more on brick-and-mortar travel agencies.
At the time, Collart told Entrevestor the shift would help Trip Ninja scale faster. He said Trip Ninja wasn’t immune to Covid-19’s impact on the travel sector but that the pivot positioned the company well to capitalize on an eventual recovery.
The company had eight employees and Collart said they weren’t planning to raise any capital until 2021.
Yesterday, in his own LinkedIn post, co-founder and COO Brett Zeigler reflected on his time with Trip Ninja.
He said he and his co-founders built the company “to help us find cheap fares for a grad trip [but] when we put our rudimentary program on the internet for other people to use we wouldn’t have believed where it would lead us: building a company, raising funding, and meeting travel professionals all over the world.”
“Unfortunately, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the pressures it has put on the travel industry, we have made the difficult decision to close down Trip Ninja. It’s been an amazing ride and we are tremendously grateful to our investors, employees, and partners for believing in us and supporting us along the way,” Zeigler said.
Casey said that, even though Trip Ninja is shutting down, the company’s impact will continue to be felt in the region.
“Startups are a tough business [and] I think Andres and his colleagues have made a big impact. So that’s been a success on its own,” she said.
“The only thing I would hope is that Andres and his colleagues continue to be an important and engaged part of the startup community in Nova Scotia, because he’s really just such an important part of it.”
Zeigler, Collart and other former Trip Ninja employees now say they are looking for new opportunities. Collart also said the technology Trip Ninja ran on is now for sale.
Check back with Huddle soon to see what Collart himself has to say about Trip Ninja and his future plans.