Americans will spend more than $144.8 billion on fishing and hunting in 2022 alone, according to research by US Fish and Wildlife Service. Organized hunting and fishing trips are an important part of this industry, but have largely remained offline. Reservations are made by phone and paid for by physical checks or cash. Mallard Bay wants to change that.
The Houston-based startup is a marketplace for consumers hunting and fishing to find and book tours the same way they would book a hotel online. Mallard Bay is also a vertical SaaS platform for builders themselves to bring their office online and provide additional services such as marketing.
The startup this week announced a $4.6 million Series A round led by Soul Venture Partners with participation from existing investment firm Acadian Capital Ventures and other angel investors. Logan Meaux, co-founder and CEO of Mallard Bay, told TechCrunch that he got the idea for the company after an ill-advised hunting trip with his father when he was in college. He thought he had booked a three-day guided duck hunt in Oklahoma. When they showed up, they discovered that the hunt was double and their only option was to hunt for a day with 13 other people. Mo never fired a single shot.
At the time, Meaux was working for his father’s startup Waitr, which raised $24 million in venture capital before exiting in 2018, and thought he might start a company of his own. In 2019, he and two other co-founders got jobs. The original idea was to just create a marketplace like Airbnb for people to book these guided hunts. Once the company started asking partners and drivers for their thoughts on the idea, they realized they would have to bring more to the table to get drivers to sign on. This led them to start building Guidetech, Mallard Bay’s back office solution for apparel.
“[Outfitters] they were receptive to the idea, they knew that keeping up with the times was something they wanted to do, but by nature craftsmen are not business owners first,” Meaux said. “They started as drivers, doing what they love and building a business based on passion. [With] we’re passionate not only about the outdoors and going hunting and fishing, but also about the software space, we brought them the domain expertise to say, “Hey, if you’re going to make that transition, we’re the guys to ‘this.'”
After the company got Toby Brohlin, an influencer hunter, on the platform, more outfitters started signing up. Brohlin has booked more than $1 million in gross bookings, Meux said. The platform as a whole facilitated more than $6 million in gross bookings in 2023 and is on track to reach $30 to $35 million in 2024.
Despite the company’s market size and traction, Meaux said it was difficult to get investors to sign up — the company spoke to more than 270 investors to raise this round — because investors didn’t understand the category or its potential. . The startup also had to navigate people’s negative perceptions of hunting and reassure potential backers that this was not a platform to book exotic hunting trips in Africa. Another key point the founders wanted to share with investors: When hunting and fishing is done ethically, it actually helps with conservation, something the company is passionate about.
“The one thing that comes with hunting and fishing is being an environmentalist,” Moe said. “It kind of comes with the territory because ultimately, as we were shown the ropes by our parents on how to do things, we want our kids to be able to do the same things. If you don’t have sustainable practices, sustainable wildlife management, overpopulation is detrimental to wildlife in general.”
Mallard Bay co-founders, from left: Wyatt Mallett, Logan Meaux, Joel Moreau and Tam Nguyen. Image Credits: Mallard Bay
While I’m not a hunter myself and only fish occasionally, the Mallard Bay deal caught my eye because I can’t say I often hear about hunting or fishing in the startup and tech ecosystem. Hunting SaaS is an interesting concept! And it’s not even the only hunting-related company to raise funding recently: HLRBO, an online platform to make it easier to find hunting land leases, raised a $1 million seed round in February.
It’s also remarkable how much Mallard has been able to grow since its launch in 2021. Mallard Bay bookings are up 600% year-over-year, which is impressive for any category, but remarkable in a category like hunting and fishing. which seems relatively specialized. As I’ve said before, the riches are in the niches – possibly because niche markets are never as small as they first appear.
People in the US spent more 394 billion dollars in outdoor activities – including hunting and fishing, but also hiking, bird watching and more – but many of these industries are still largely offline or dependent on low-quality, difficult-to-navigate technology. I experienced this last month when I tried to find parking to hike Sedona, Arizona’s very popular Devil’s Bridge Trail. I had to gather information from several blogs to see if I even needed a parking pass.
There are also case studies beyond Mallard Bay showing that these outdoor-focused applications are in customer demand. Strava, an app aimed at runners and cyclists, has over 100 million users. Apps that connect people who share a common outdoor activity like fishing also have strong appeal. Fishbrain, a social media app for anglers, has logged more than 14 million fish caught in its 12-year history.
For Meaux, he knows how big this could become, and despite the progress they’ve made so far, he believes there’s still so much of the market to conquer and more potential to be built into Guidetech.
“I like to say we’ve had some success, but we’re not successful yet,” Mo said. “And that’s something I learned from my dad along the way. In his companies, even after the exit, they still had work to be done.”
