If you want to find a campsite in France, the website Campsited is a good place to search. The brainchild of Finán O’Donoghue, the venture is unusual in that the founder has managed to raise substantial seed capital for a consumer-facing business. In Ireland most early stage capital is directed at B2B enterprises, but to date O’Donoghue (45) has personally raised €2.6m from investors, and has ambitions to raise more.

On Campsited, users can choose from c.2,000 campsites in France, Belgium, Italy and Spain. The majority of the sites are in France, Europe’s largest camping market, with estimated annual campsite spend of €5 billion.

O’Donoghue (pictured) learned about camping in Kerry from his father, who was also a computer enthusiast who developed a business around early personal computers such as the BBC Micro. “I researched many different businesses ideas and none of them really grabbed me until Campsited came along,” says O’Donoghue.

The idea occurred when the entrepreneur went online to book a camping holiday and found that he couldn’t. So he decided to fill the gap. Ecommodation Lab Ltd was incorporated in 2013 and version one of Campsited was launched six years ago.

Progress has been slow. The 2017/18 loss was €390,000 followed by a loss of €920,000 in 2019 on revenue of €42,000. Yet investors have kept faith, and the founder roped in €1.5m from investors in 2019.

In Association with

“We’ve been on rolling investment rounds since the company was formed, which ties back to the challenge of raising funds for a consumer-facing brand in Ireland,” says O’Donoghue. “It’s a case of constantly talking and pitching to people and selling the Campsited opportunity. Thankfully we are now starting to make the progress to get to where we want to end up. We’re moving into a phase where the funding requirement is substantial, and we’re bringing in external advisors to assist.”

The funding rounds in 2019 included €450,000 from American investor Motley Fool Ventures. “That led from just talking to people in my network, developing those relationships and trying to understand if there might be anybody in their circle who could offer me some advice. We were fortunate to secure an introduction with Motley Fool Ventures and I developed a very good relationship, based on trust and complete transparency.”

Operational Hurdles

Campsited has two operational hurdles. Firstly, developing a robust tech back-end and a website in English and French, with more languages to come. Secondly, the firm has to tie down the campsite operators to showcase their facilities and agree commercial terms. This heavy lifting takes times and money: the venture had overheads of €960,000 in 2019 and minimal income.

Despite the pandemic, O’Donoghue says Campsited enjoyed good throughput in 2020, as French campsites in various regions were open through the summer. To bring the business to the next level requires further capital, so the quicker the vaccine rollout across Europe the better for Campsited.

By some estimates, the annual market for campsite bookings across Europe is c. €12 billion. Only 4% is booked through intermediaries compared with 37% for hotels. “There are a whole lot of people who want to be serviced by a really good, consumer-facing experience. That’s the problem that we’re solving. Our platform is built for scale and all of the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.”