SilverRail Technologies, the company behind the global rail ticketing platform SilverCore, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The investment accelerates SilverRail’s vision of making passenger rail travel as easy to book as airline tickets.

This news follows a highly successful year in which SilverRail added several new rail carriers to its platform, including Renfe in Spain and ViaRail in Canada.

SilverRail also partnered with global travel sellers ebookers, GetThere, Egencia, KDS and several others to offer multi-country rail into their core booking platforms.

Canaan Partners led the Series B funding as the first investment in their new $600m fund IX.

SilverRail’s current investors Sutter Hill, Accel Partners, GrandBanks Capital and Brook Ventures also strongly supported the round. 

The funding enables SilverRail to accelerate the addition of rail carriers and the development of cross-border and inter-carrier journey planning. 

SilverRail’s goal is to have all of Europe’s major rail carriers integrated into the SilverCore platform in the next two years.

Aaron Gowell and Will Phillipson founded SilverRail in 2009 to disrupt the multibillion-dollar rail travel industry.

By consolidating content across multiple rail carrier systems, SilverRail has created a marketplace for sellers and suppliers to connect where historically it has been close to impossible.

With extensive experience as pioneers in online travel technology, Aaron and Will saw the complexities and fragmented nature of the global rail market, and recognised the opportunity to make the search, shopping, booking and support of train tickets as easy as air tickets.

SilverRail is now consolidating the world’s rail ticketing systems, seamlessly connecting suppliers, sellers and search.

“The $300bn rail market is the single fastest growing sector of travel today,” said Aaron Gowell, chief executive and co-founder of SilverRail Technologies.

“Passenger rail will increasingly dominate regional travel, driven by the perfect storm of four factors: 200 mph trains replacing regional air travel; rail markets deregulating and creating competition; a 90 per cent cleaner environmental footprint than air travel; and, $200bn a year investment in infrastructure - 2x the investment in the commercial air industry.”