Travelers spend 5 to 10% of their budget on souvenirs and homegrown brands.
No global platform serves this $60B market.
Agoda put the world's hotels in one place. Klook did it for experiences. Avendi is doing it for every city's homegrown brands.
Found and chosen along the way, not grabbed on the way home. Shopping becomes part of the trip.
01The opportunity
The habit exists. What changed is what they pay for.
Travelers always buy something where they stay. What has changed is that younger travelers now pay more for locally trending brands and rare craft than for mass produced gift shop items.
$78
Average spend on souvenirs and local goods, per trip.
83%
Of Gen Z and Millennial travelers prioritize unique, authentic experiences over standard tourist offerings.
02The problem
For travelers
You'd still get ripped off.
Travelers are curious about what a city makes, but nobody researches shopping on holiday. So you walk into whatever's nearby and pay the tourist price for something mass produced, often made somewhere else.
For local brands
Local brands still can't reach the tourists.
Makers would love to sell to visitors, but tourist district rents are out of reach and duty free contracts go to the big names. So the brand locals love sells to locals only.
03How travelers solve it today
Duty free
The most common option. The same assortment in every airport, mass produced and often manufactured elsewhere.
Gift shops in tourist centers
Stock changes little year to year, selection is driven by commission rather than by what is trending among locals, and items are priced for tourists, not at local rates.
Searching independently
Blogs, Reddit, TikTok and AI assistants describe what a city is known for but do not sell it. The traveler still has to find the shop, judge the price and carry it home.
04What we do
Discover a city's best local brands, buy in a few taps, delivered to your hotel in three hours.
Discover
A catalog curated city by city: craft from local artisans and the brands residents are buying now. Nothing to install, it opens in the browser.
Buy
Fixed, transparent prices with no haggling. Travelers enter their hotel and room number and pay online.
Receive
Bike couriers from networks like Uber and Grab deliver to their hotel or Airbnb, tracked the whole way.
See the app screensHide the app screens
DiscoverBuyReceive
05How we make money
30% commission on every order
Charged to the brand. Travelers pay the same price either way, and makers join with no listing fee.
Next to test
Brand subscriptions for featured placement, and a premium tier on commissioned pieces.
Subscription
Vendors pay to sell more
Brands wanting more listings, ads, in hotel exposure, or dedicated support pay a monthly subscription.
Tested
Premium
High ticket products
We curate premium brands like luxury crafts, artisan goods, and high end gifts to grow GMV and commissions.
Tested
Avendi Original
Collaboration products
Avendi teams up with local influencers and travel experts to jointly create original products with local artists.
Validating feasibility
Avendi Pay
Discover online, collect in store
Travelers find a product online, prepay via Avendi, then visit the store to inspect and collect it.
Concept stage
06Why now
A new city opens in two weeks, with no local team
Our in house AI agent runs the supply side: product copy, translation, catalog publishing and dispatch on every order. Work that once needed a local team in every market now runs from one central team, at a fraction of the cost and time it took before. With no fleet or storage to build, a new city adds no fixed cost.
07Traction
$22.5K
Revenue / month
$75K
GMV / month
$44
Avg order value
13%
MoM growth
BTW, our largest single order so far was $8,200.
Live: Kathmandu · Singapore · OkinawaLaunching: Dubai · BangkokNext: Niseko · Bali · Hanoi · Tashkent
08How we reach travelers
Our current bet for initial traction
Hotel activation
Lobby displays, check in and in room touchpoints at partner hotels. Hotels earn a share of every sale, so placement cost for us is minimal.
Always on in the background
Social, search and AI
Our team DMs travelers in each live city, and we build SEO and AEO to rank for "best souvenirs in [city]", including in ChatGPT and Gemini.
Ongoing, at a smaller scale
Travel partners
Agencies, transport operators and eSIM providers activate the travelers they already have, and take ancillary revenue in return.
09Team
Saujanya Acharya (CEO) and Prachet Sharma (COO). Eight years in travel and hospitality, 20,000+ travelers and ~100 hotels served across ASEAN, South Asia and the Middle East. Country leads in Singapore and Japan bring existing local brand networks. Development and back office run from our team in Kathmandu, Nepal.
10The ask
$250K
SAFE · $6M valuation cap Bridge · open now
45%
Growth
25%
Product
20%
Vendors
10%
Operations
Use of this round. Deploy into the 40 hotels currently being onboarded, which at present conversion rates supports a $1M+ annualized revenue run rate within six to eight months.
