Launching a Smarter Travel Search—and Powering a $15M Fundraise

Expert area: Travel tech

Technologies: Java Spring, Cypress, React, Postgres tables for data, Google Maps API

In less than a year, Remedy improved the partner’s architecture and built a new tool from the ground up, which resulted in press from CNN and The Points Guy, helping the company close a $15 million series B round.

About‍ the Company

This partner is making travel more straight-forward and accessible. Its real-time search engine simplifies booking flights with points and miles by letting users compare all point options in one place. All users need to do is enter an origin, destination, and dates, to find the best award options. 

The company provides step-by-step guides and videos on how to choose the best deal, transfer points, and book a reward flight across dozens of frequent flyer programs. 

‍The Problem

Following their series A, the partner approached Remedy to develop a new product-line to expand their pre-existing search engine. The tool  would allow flexible travelers to enter an origin airport and date range to find available award flights across multiple destination options.

Additionally, the partner engaged Remedy’s DevOps engineers to evolve their infrastructure. 

The Solution

Remedy kicked off the partnership in July 2023 and simultaneously stood up two teams: one to build the new tool, and another to focus on DevOps.

New Tool 

Remedy assembled an autonomous team consisting of a product manager, solutions architect, backend engineer, frontend engineer, and UI/UX designer to build the feature from scratch. Remedy’s team broke down the build into discovery and development phases. 

The team built a search function that allowed users to find the best deals with their points and miles based on general travel requirements such as “beach”or “foodie cities” rather than a specific destination. To use the engine, a traveler enters an origin airport and date range to find available award flights across multiple destinations that all meet their general travel criteria. 

The Remedy team built the filter system that narrows down travel destinations based on the traveler’s criteria and created a map that visualizes the resulting destination types. 

The company had a pre-existing database of user searches and behaviors in their original search-engine, and Remedy engineers connected to this database so the new tool’s destination options would display based on their popularity with users.

For example, if a user was traveling from New York and looking for a city destination in Europe, the feature would recommend flight options to Paris or Madrid, which performed well with past users, before less popular options.

DevOps

Remedy brought in two full-time engineers to stand up a Kubernetes environment. 

During the partnership, the engineers took on major infrastructure upgrades and migrated all of the partner’s architecture from Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) clusters, using Helm for deployment. While working on the infrastructure upgrades, the DevOps team trained the partner’s internal teams on build and deployment practices to prepare for a successful handoff of the work. 

After the migration, the team implemented and configured New Relic, a cloud-based platform that lets you monitor and manage the performance of your applications and infrastructure.

Testimonial

“Remedy brought deep technical expertise to our DevOps transformation, providing insightful recommendations that significantly improved our infrastructure. Their knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Helm enabled us to streamline deployments, enhance reliability, and scale efficiently. Beyond the backend, their team developed a new tool and enhanced user experience without disrupting core functionality. They were a trusted and valuable partner in our development efforts.” - Lewis Hall, former Head of Engineering

The Result‍

In six months, Remedy’s team conducted a discovery phase, built the new tool from the ground up, and launched it in December 2023. After the launch, Remedy’s team handed off detailed documentation to the partner, so they could iterate the feature down the line. 

Remedy’s DevOps engineers continued working with the company until May 2024. Their contributions increased security and expedited scaling by making new features simpler to develop and the application easier to update. 

The Impact

• Remedy assisted our partner in crossing the finish line in two fundraises. 

  
  

• Prior to partnering, Remedy’s Head of Product and Strategy Iggy Moliver helped source investors for their series A, which resulted in participation from RiverPark Ventures.

  
  

• The tool launch was also a milestone that helped push the partner through their next fundraise in 2024, a $15 million series B co-led by Nyca Partners and Citi Ventures.

  
  

• The release of the tool also led to a variety of positive press, including an article in CNN’s travel section breaking down the feature’s value. The Points Guy, a leading travel publication with over 8 million monthly readers, also published an article covering the feature launch.