Wego was launched by co-founders Ross Veitch (CEO), a former executive of Yahoo! and Craig Hewett (CCO), formerly with the InterContinental Hotels Group. The duo had an extensive understanding of online travel and in 2005 somewhat pioneered travel metasearch in the Asia Pacific region.
Selecting Singapore to base their headquarters, both for its proximity to some of the largest emerging travel regions in the world and the Singapore government’s support of startup companies, Veitch and Hewett set up a team of accomplished tech developers to design Wego, with the objective of saving travellers time and money while shopping for travel online.
In 2006, when seeking out series A financing, they toured Silicon Valley to meet with VCs, many of which liked the model, team and markets, they were tackling, but wanted them to physically move to Silicon Valley as a condition of investing.
“Moving our operations to the US from Singapore made absolutely no sense to us given we were addressing APAC markets so we passed on these deals. As it turns out VCs don’t like to have travel far to visit their investments and this was true even for those guys with large China and India funds for whom adding on an extra sector to Singapore every other quarter for a board meeting was too much. Fortunately things have changed for today’s Singapore based startups,” said Ross.
Since that time Wego has enjoyed remarkable growth becoming the leading travel search site in the Asia Pacific and Middle East, with regional offices opened in Jakarta, Bangalore and Dubai.
Read more : Singapore Business Review