Tao Tao studied at ETH Zurich. In 2009 his classmate Johannes Reck arrived a day early for a trip to Beijing, and Tao showed him around. They saw how hard it was for a traveller to find a good local guide and began building a peer-to-peer platform. The company was incorporated in Zurich that year with money from friends and family.
Investors turned them down more than 100 times, and the team stayed alive for four years without venture capital. The amateur-guide idea did not work, so they built reservation software for professional tour operators and put that inventory on one booking site.
The headquarters moved to Berlin in 2012. A Series A of $14 million came in 2013, then $25 million in 2014, $50 million in 2015 and $75 million in 2017. In 2019 SoftBank's Vision Fund led a $484 million round, and the company had sold more than 25 million tickets.
In May 2023 GetYourGuide raised $194 million at a $2 billion valuation. In October 2025 it announced its first profit, on about €1 billion in sales over the previous year. The company is privately held.