Berlin-based travel platform Omio has agreed to acquire Rail Europe, a nearly century-old rail ticketing company, and separately landed a $10 million investment from Granite-Integral, an Asia-focused venture firm, as the startup expands into Asia.
The Rail Europe deal, announced July 16, gives Omio access to “22,000 travel agencies that distribute European rail content, many of which are in Asia,” CEO Naren Shaam explained to Fortune. Those agencies currently sell mostly European train tickets, but Omio plans to fill them with Asian rail content. “The same Chinese customer that goes to Europe also goes to Japan, goes to Southeast Asia, goes to India, goes to Thailand,” he said. (Neither Omio nor Rail Europe have disclosed the terms of the deal)
Omio expanded into Southeast Asia last year and into Japan earlier this year, following a pandemic-era retreat that delayed its global ambitions.
More broadly, Shaam thinks that travel is spreading to “new corridors.” That’s good for Omio, as lesser-known destinations are often served better by rail and bus connections instead of aviation.
“There’s a lot of tourism that’s highly concentrated in the ‘Golden Triangle’: Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto,” Shaam explained. “We can push customers to more regions. Hokkaido to Kyushu may be harder, but we don’t want to just focus on the touristy corridors.”
Visitor arrivals across Asia are forecast to reach 710 million this year, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association. According to the group’s data, visitor arrivals finally exceeded pre-COVID levels last year.
Omio’s new funding comes from Granite-Integral, a joint venture between Singapore’s Granite Asia and Tokyo-listed private equity firm Integral Corporation, launched in 2025 with $100 million in committed capital to back tech companies entering Japan. “Japan and Southeast Asia represent some of the most important long-term opportunities in global travel, with growing demand for more connected journeys across the region,” CK Choun, Granite-Integral’s co-head, said in a statement on July 23.
Expanding to Asia can be difficult for a Europe-based platform, due to lengthy contract negotiations and a lack of experience with how things work on the ground. “It takes three years to get a Japanese contract,” Shaam said. “You need to put a lot of capital to work to get the inventory, get the systems up and running, and build scale—and then the economics take a very long time to work out. You really need to play the long game.”
That is where Granite-Integral comes in, Shaam said, less for the capital itself than for the access it brings. “They can open a lot of doors,” he said.
Omio, founded by Shaam in 2013 as GoEuro after a frustrating European rail-booking trip, has raised more than $600 million to date and operates in 47 markets, serving roughly one billion users a year and selling more than 130,000 tickets daily.
The Asian booking market is crowded, with platforms like Trip.com, Klook and Agoda offering access to hotels, flights, and experiences. Yet Shaam thinks there’s room for one more.
“Ninety percent of all travel companies focus on three things: Air, hotel, and car rental,” Shaam said. “There are two spaces that aren’t fully developed yet on a global platform: One is ground transit—anything that moves a person from one more person to another–and the second is activities.”
Fellow travel startup Klook, for its part, focuses on experiences, which Shaam thinks is underserved. “Nowadays, most people travel not because they want to stay at a hotel, but because of specific activities they want to do in a location,” Klook CEO Ethan Lin recently explained to Fortune. “They may want to do a Hyrox in Seoul, watch a Taylor Swift concert in Singapore, or go on a road trip and visit the aquarium in Okinawa.”
More broadly, Shaam thinks there’s room for Omio in a global travel market. “Global travel is accelerating. More people are coming into the middle class, more people have passports,” he said. “When I grew up, going to ten countries was a gift. Now, people say things like ‘I’m in country No. 70.’”
