He co-built his travel tech Tripesa from the ashes of another startup: Roundbob. The new startup has already earned the trust of several investors. 

David Gonahasa (photo) is a Ugandan economist and entrepreneur. He is also the CEO of travel tech Tripesa, which he co-founded in 2021 with Thomas Karugaba and Raymond Byaruhanga.

Tripesa was born out of the ashes of travel booking platform Roundbob during the coronavirus pandemic, which affected the whole world.  It offers African SMEs operating in the tourism industry a solution to optimize their operations and improve their profitability. 

“Small businesses must be able to package tourism and digitally distribute a splendid tourism experience for it to sell, or else they stand to lose the market to the few bigger players. [...]  What Tripesa is doing is leveling the playing field, enabling small operators to leverage technology to escape the market limitations and scale their businesses,”  David told TechCabal in August 2022 when Tripesa closed an undisclosed pre-seed round to scale across Africa. 

Apart from his passion for the African tourism industry, David Gonahasa is also a wildlife conservation enthusiast. In 2021, he co-founded The Naturalist, a conservation company leveraging technology to protect wildlife resources. Through his conservation company, he launched the Home of the Gorillas project, which aims to create additional revenues to complement the tourist trekking income that remains the main source of financing the Mountain Gorilla conservation. 

In 2018, he participated in the Alibaba e-founders fellowship program. A year earlier, he won the Innovator of the Year Prize during the MTN Innovations Awards.  David is a seasoned entrepreneur with several ventures under his belt but, he also has an extensive professional career, which started in 2007. That year, after being the business development director of the e-business company Mediaflower Uganda he co-founded, he joined advertising company Creaxion Rwanda as an account director. The following year, he assumed services as a client services manager for the online marketing agency MAAD Advertising. He later joined Real Marketing Uganda, another marketing agency, as its strategic director before assuming office as the chief marketing officer of universal payment platform Mobicash Africa, in 2011. Some years later, he made a brief stint as a senior consultant for business manager SMEHUB. 

Melchior Koba