Mike McGearty didn’t talk to anyone until he needed to. For the first two years of Meili, there was nothing to say.

He and Bobby Healy, longtime friends and longer-time colleagues, were quietly building a travel tech company targeting the same market, the same clients, the same business as Cartrawler, the Irish business they had grown into the largest car-hire platform in the world.

When McGearty, Cartrawler’s chief executive, and Healy, chief technology officer, left the car-rental company in 2018, six months apart, it was in good shape as one of Ireland’s first unicorns and one of the most successful businesses in the country. 

Cartrawler is now led by chief executive Peter O’Donovan and is under the control of Towerbrook, a British private equity firm, which rescued the company with an emergency €100 million financing deal during the pandemic. After a rocky few years, the company is now trading strongly and a buyer is being sought. 

While Cartrawler went through a management evolution, the two former C-suiters rallied around town; McGearty spending time with his parents, while he still could, and his children, while they still wanted to. Healy conjured up the hardware for his drone company, Manna, the Biblical name of which he quickly printed onto white shell jackets reminiscent of space suits. 

But while the pandemic raged, the quotidian boredom set in and the idea for starting a business together took shape. 

“The usual suspects”

The way McGearty tells it, it was entirely natural and sense-making to return to fallow turf and begin again. The travel tech industry is tight-knit and the car rental space within that even more so, making decades of experience, pedigree and birdseye hindsight a strong offering. 

You could say that they are now aiming to build Cartrawler 2.0 but it could be reductive.

Meili is the product of the duo’s ambition to select the best parts of Cartrawler and leave the lumbering chunks behind. They are moving without the encumbrance of a historical tech business built on top of a broker model, and are building a platform that has no need for hundreds of staff in customer service roles. It is handing that responsibility off to the car rental companies themselves.  

Being capital-efficient may not be the most exciting thing to focus on, as McGearty sees it, but it is close to the most important thing. 

Two and a half years after founding the business, it signed its first major airline, Lufthansa. It now has five airlines in total, a rake of car rental companies, and has a few more major clients in the wings. McGearty won’t say who are the clients about to sign on the dotted line, but it took Cartrawler, under his stewardship, six years to land its first big airline, so he’s seeing it as a validation of the new model and a pathway to winning bigger airlines.

With a tight team of thirty plucked from a pool of former colleagues and personal networks, Meili has taken form and, with ease, raised €15 million to date. If all goes to plan, the company won’t ever employ more than 80 people. It won’t need to. 

Meili’s pre-seed round of €7 million came from “the usual suspects” of high-net-worth individuals who invest in tech companies, as McGearty puts it. The company raised it in under a fortnight in its first year in 2021. It was orchestrated by a well-connected mover in the Irish market. McGearty won’t give a name on the record, but in two days the networker was able to put together a week’s worth of meetings with investors. Halfway through the week, the seed round was oversubscribed. “Ridiculous,” is how McGearty remembers it. 

A seed round of €8.1 million, closed earlier this year. It was led by Schooner Capital, a Boston-based VC company which is heavy on med-tech companies in its portfolio. Schooner came after Healy met the firm to talk about Manna. The drone business wasn’t in its risk profile, but Meili was. Tribal Ventures, the Dublin-based VC, was also in the round. 

Now that the money is raised and the platform is up and running, it’s time for Meili to begin its offensive. 

Out in front

From a high-ceilinged meeting room inside the labyrinth of Nova UCD, built within and around an 18th-century Georgian villa, McGearty gave his first real interview on Meili to The Currency. Until now, everyone who needed to know what the company was building knew. The rest, he felt, was extraneous. 

But Meili’s recent funding round and its soon-to-be-announced signing of several major clients have precipitated the need to be out in front. 

Tall and broad, McGearty, who is an accountant by training, speaks with his hands, drawing graphs in the air as a visual aid. Lower-key than his partner Healy, he typically isn’t the one on stage or in front of a mic and he cringes at the memory of being Batman to Michael O’Leary’s Robin, for a promo shoot atop a vintage emblazoned Cadillac batmobile, to announce a Ryanair and Cartrawler partnership in 2015. 

A photo from the press conference that followed shows McGearty in his tight grey costume, with his hand over his mouth disbelieving of the spectacle that O’Leary, his short sleeve sidekick for the day, had happily created. 

While Healy and McGearty own Meili equally, Healy’s role is ad hoc, an hour here or there, lending his expertise, clout and networking capabilities to push it forward.  So it is falling on McGearty to be the public face of the company.

And it’s not the easiest job, because Meili by its nature is a boring company. It provides the platform for customers to rent cars while buying flights and if it does its job right, then the customer won’t even know it exists and won’t care. The aim is to be invisible and seamless, so that booking a car rental or an airport transfer, when buying flights, becomes a no-brainer.

“In Cartrawler we started on a broker model, because it grew out of Argus Car Hire, which was an online broker,” McGearty said. 

“When we looked back, we realised the amount of friction that caused, in every sense of the word, starting with the customer – from loyalty programme issues to insurance that caused issues at the desk. 

“So there were all these kinds of things, from a customer perspective, that didn’t work well. And if the customer has been introduced via an airline or another travel brand and if they’re not having a good experience, that has a negative impact on the airline as well.”

As well as the customer issues, the broker model also has a lot of “bias” built into it, with overrides and rebates. A customer tends to be presented with options based on maximising revenue for the car rental company rather than what their actual requirements are, McGearty said.

He added that the tension with a broker model is the customer service it must provide, meaning the company can never scale effectively because the number of customer service staff it needs is linear to trading volume.

Poaching and pursuing

As McGearty explains it, the software should be seamlessly integrated between car rental companies and airlines, and the customer should be able to make a quick decision, intuitively able to see the best deal for them. They shouldn’t feel there is a better deal elsewhere and they should feel assured that the car they choose will be transparently available to them, without hidden costs, when they arrive after a flight. 

For the airline, it should be an easy source of third-party ancillary income that goes straight to the bottom line, the same way seat selection functions.

For a car rental or mobility company, it’s a necessary funnel to compete for “ownership” of their customers. 

So if the tech is better, more fluid and with less friction, presumably the clients that Meili wants are the ones that Cartrawler has? 

McGearty agrees but only partly. Yes, they will be going after Cartrawler’s clients, but there are a lot of airlines out there and car rental companies with their own technology, and they’ll be going after them too.

“I don’t for one minute believe that, in five years from now, every single airline is going to be using our technology,” McGearty said, “but I believe that there are a significant number who will.” 

The advantage of having been there before is that the founders have their point of contact. They know the heads of airlines or car rental companies, and they’ve known them for a long time.

Meili’s confidence is not just bloviating. Before the company ever got off the ground, its model was already validated by old friends and future clients. As McGearty sees it, when you’ve earned a relationship of trust with stakeholders over years, they will respect you, and be honest in their feedback.

“If we were still 24 or 25, and this was our first gig, would we be able to go in and get Lufthansa to sign with us? No, we wouldn’t,” McGearty says.

“You have your reputation, you have your track record, they know. And they trust what you’ve built before, they know and believe in what you’re building this time. So it’s much easier to get traction with people. Same with the car rental companies.” 

Who owns the customer?

Just as every law firm, LinkedIn poet and thought leader is talking about AI, the topic comes up with McGearty too. But the perspective is different.

He is considering how ChaptGTP and its rivals are going to influence the travel industry by disrupting the funnel through which a customer enters and exits, and ultimately who owns their business. How customers choose to search for flights, etc in the future could be vastly different.

“It’s a bit like Google ads at the beginning. It wasn’t necessarily the best service providers appearing at the top, but it was the best intermediaries who know how to do PPC (pay-per-click) and search engine optimisation (SEO) very well when they started capturing customers,” McGearty said. 

“So where is the funnel now? Where is the key starting point of the funnel going to be? Is it going to be AI?”

The other point of pain McGearty is looking at is how different platforms are muscling in on different parts of the travel industry. He gave the example of Booking.com, a hotel booking platform which has begun to sell flights. 

The purpose of this is to capture the customer earlier in the funnel, giving them the chance to sell car rentals and transfers and insurance – meaning the airline is only getting the minimum, a flight booking.

“That’s a pretty shit place to be for them,” McGearty said. “And it’s worrying if that agent starts building their distribution over the next number of years. 

“Where the service providers need to go, well, we need to be at the forefront, rather than on the backfoot here, because we could be facing another 10 years where we don’t own the customer.”