SkyScanner, the fast-growing Scottish website for travellers, has been awarded a £2.5m first-round funding package from the venture capital group Scottish Equity Partners.

The Edinburgh-based company, which was founded in 2003, said it planned to use the new cash to become the first travel search engine in the world to cover every scheduled flight - a goal it said it will achieve next year.

Co-founder Gareth Williams said: "Skyscanner will become the first flight search engine in the world to show fares for every flight at the touch of a button."

Its website currently allows consumers to obtain instant online comparisons on fares from more than 180 airlines to more than 5000 destinations in 20 languages.

Williams said the money will be used specifically on marketing, building up its commercial team to expand its relationship with airlines, and on developing improved software tools that will enable its unique search engine to integrate with other sites.

The company last year - its fourth year of operation - turned over £1.4m and made pre-tax profit of around £350,000.

Skyscanner began as an idea to help co-founders Williams, Barry Smith, and Bonamy Grimes find cheap ski breaks on the internet.

The idea grew out of the shared frustration of three IT professionals. They felt that what should have been a straightforward process - to find the cheapest flights for a last-minute ski break - always turned into a lengthy and fruitless task.

Now its website boasts around 100,000 hits and conducts more than one million price searches each day, and it has so far booked hundreds of thousands of flights.

Skyscanner's technology searches millions of internet sites, and then compares and contrasts each flight for its relative advantages, such as cost, time and date of departure and destination. It also books the flight.

The trio, all former contract IT workers at Marks & Spencer, at first agreed to avoid the venture capitalist, big bank loan scenarios and instead put 10% of their salaries into a fund for six months as seed capital.

Then they started pumping more than 90% of their incomes into the fledgling business.

Williams said: "According to our business plan, this is all the funding we'll need. The fact is that the roots of this business are pretty much geek-based, and if we want to really grow we need to invest in the marketing and commercial side of the business.

"The funding from SEP will enable us to move more rapidly towards global leadership."

He added that the company, which now has a staff of 26 - including an eight-employee team in Poland - plans to increase its headcount to around 50 over the next 18 months.

Stuart Paterson, a director at Glasgow-based SEP, said: "Skyscanner has the potential to become a world leader in the travel sector. The company has a talented management team, underpinned by smart technology and a highly scalable business model."