SEATFROG: Venture capital investor Octopus Ventures has led a £4·5m Series A funding round at Seatfrog, which has developed mobile auction technology enabling passengers to upgrade train and airline seats until the time of departure. Existing investors including Howzat Partners also participated.

Octopus Ventures partner Luke Hakes will join the Seatfrog board. ‘Having seen the impact of dynamic revenue management systems within hotels and airlines, we feel there is a very interesting opportunity in applying this approach to the multi-billion dollar train travel industry’, he said on July 9.

Seatfrog launched on the UK’s East Coast Main Line in September 2017, and now has offices in London and Sydney. ‘Every year billions of pounds in unrealised ancillary revenue passes by because of manual, fragmented legacy processes’, said co-founder and CEO Iain Griffin. ‘We set out a year ago to prove there is a much better way and we’ve done that.’