TripActions, a Palo Alto-based corporate travel management startup, has raised $250 million in Series D round. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures and Group 11.
Due to this funding round, the valuation of the startup shot up to $4 billion, almost four times its valuation during its Series C round in November last year. The same participants had raised $154 million during Series C leading to the inclusion of Ben Horowitz (Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz) to the company’s board of directors. This round had earned the company a unicorn status.
TripActions was founded in 2015 by Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig. The platform offers accommodations, flights and transportation services for business travelers. It integrates with company HR and expense systems so that the consumer enterprises have ease of accountability.
TripActions competes with established players in this sector like SAP Concur and American Express Co.’s travel service by offering rewards to its customers through gift cards. Their platform is AI-driven platform which ensures that errors are reduced in their system and their customers have a 24/7 global support.
It also provides a VIP program for executive travelers, TripActions Luxe. TripActions’ in-house Meetings & Event solution (for employees traveling in group) and TripActions’ Guest Invite Portal (for HR and recruiting teams) are among other services the company provides.
According to TripActions’ CEO Ariel Cohen, the company’s revenue is now growing 500% a year and it handles $1.1 billion of clients’ travel spending, The company now handles clients like WeWork, Zoom, Dropbox, Robinhood, Lyft, Twilio, Allbirds and Tuft & Needle among a customer base of 2000.
Cohen, in an interview with TechCrunch said, “We are going after a really big industry. We are replacing something people don’t like. They don’t like the tools corporates are giving them today to book business trips.” He later added, “Do we need the entire amount of money we’ve raised to date? The answer is no. But do we want the means to seize the opportunity in the long term? The answer is hell yes.”
The Global Business Travel Association forecasts that global business traveling spending will soar to $1.7 trillion by 2022. With a unicorn status, TripActions seems to have become a key player in this expanding business traveling sector.
Recently, TripActions opened its headquarters in Amsterdam, which is an engineering and data hub. Now, the company plans to utilize these funding for global expansion and to focus on R&D and AI.
