Musement is a new tours and activities site and app that aims to help travelers book tickets to popular local attractions on demand or in advance.

　　This startup in Milan currently offers admission to see Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” after hours, tickets to permanent collections and temporary art exhibitions, and day tours, such as a bike tour of castles in Piedmont.

　　Its inventory, which it sources on its own, is mainly in Europe, though its aspirations are global.

　　As of today, it says it has 450 venues as partners, including Florence’s Uffizi, the Vatican Museums, the Louvre in Paris, the Tower of London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

　　It has a curated selection of inventory, of easy choosing on a phone, rather than long lists of hundreds of suppliers.

　　The start-up is relatively well funded. It has raised $950,000 in seed money from 360 Capital Partners, IAG, and notable angels.

　　It says it has beta-tested its product with 20,000 users, which generated transactions with average value of $60.

　　In late March, it launched its free app for Apple devices for finding and booking admission to attractions, tours, and experiences wherever they are (starting with Europe). E-tickets are saved to your device or you can print them.

　　Musement’s executive team has had senior experience at large companies. The CEO previously founded and ran a video-on-demand startup, for instance. Advantage over competitors: we can include in our offer also venues with which we do not have commercial agreements, thanks to proprietary technology which allows non-negotiated integrations

　　Musement has created a Vine to illustrate its pitch:

　　Q&A with CEO Alessandro Petazzi:

　　Tell us how you founded the company. Why and what made you decide to jump in and create the business?

　　We started in 2013 with a focus on aggregating and selling tickets for permanent and temporary art exhibits, museums and attractions, then we realized that the market of travel activities and in-destination experiences was larger than that.

　　Our platform was already perfectly fit to also accommodate tours and other things to do and that the customer needs and target were very similar, so we decided to expand the scope.

　　Size of the team, names of founders, management roles and key personnel?

　　Total team of 14: 4 co-founders (Fabio Zecchini, CTO + Claudio Bellinzona, Content & Operations + Paolo Giulini, Offer and Business Development + myself as CEO), 4 developers, 3 web editors, 2 marketing and “growth hacking” (even if I don’t particularly like the term…), 1 customer care.

　　In terms of our past experiences, all of us co-founders have worked at large companies (I was the managing director of video on demand (VOD) player ON CUBED, a European competitor to Netflix).

　　Among our co-founders, Fabio has been working as Chief Data Officer for various companies, optimizing traffic acquisition costs. So we are luckily quite efficient at that.

　　The other three founders were already working at their own companies.

　　Funding arrangements?

　　We raised a first seed round of 690,000 EUR last September from 360 Capital Partners, an angel network that has already IPO-ed two of its companies.

　　We will do a new round in the next few months.

　　Estimation of market size?

　　The travel activities market is worth approximately 37B EUR (according to PhoCusWright) if we only consider European travelers, who are currently the majority of our customers.

　　The base then becomes close to 100 billion euro if we consider all travelers worldwide. Ticketing for museums and art exhibits alone is obviously a much smaller market, around 3 billion euro globally.

　　Competition?

　　The usual suspects in the travel activities world: Viator, City Discovery, Ceetiz, Isango, Peek and GetYourGuide — among other specialist players.

　　Our approach is not identical to any of them (obviously!), given our curated and mobile-first approach. But at the end we are effectively competing for the attention and money of similar people in similar situations.