TravelPerk CEO and co-founder Avi Meir.
TravelPerk
TravelPerk, a company travel platform, raised $200 million from investors including Atomico and EQT in a funding round valuing the firm at $2.7 billion, the corporate told CNBC.
The fresh financing doubles TravelPerk’s market value from January 2024, when it raised $104 million on a $1.4 billion valuation. Noteus Partners also participated on this latest investment round.
Along with the funding round, the Barcelona-based startup revealed it acquired Yokoy, a Swiss spend management platform, a deal that can see it expand its reach into financial services and turn into a more unified travel and expenses platform.
Because of this of the acquisition, Yokoy investor Sequoia Capital will join TravelPerk’s cap table alongside existing investors General Catalyst, Kinnevik, Softbank’s Vision Fund and Blackstone.
TravelPerk said the fresh money can be used to speed up growth, fuel expansion within the U.S. market and investment in product, tech and artificial intelligence.
From Covid struggles to $2.7 billion
Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, president and chief operating officer at TravelPerk, told CNBC enterprise capitalists were drawn to the firm’s growth story after it rebounded from times of struggle faced throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
TravelPerk saw revenues decline rapidly in 2020 and 2021 as most business travel got here to a standstill. Revenue has since grown to around five times the dimensions it was before Covid hit, in keeping with Taunay-Bucalo.
“Why we’re doing so well now could be because we had that period where you needed to be strong. You needed to have a superb foundation, you needed to be scrappy,” he said.
Hillary Ball, Atomico’s growth-focused partner, said the firm was drawn to investing in TravelPerk because it’s addressing “a posh and hard problem to resolve” around corporate travel.
“It is a market that resurged following the pandemic,” Ball told CNBC. “Previously 12 months, the worldwide value of corporate travel was $1.5 trillion — that is up by 6% relative to pre-pandemic and 2019. It’s really clear that this can be a market that is here to remain and one which’s growing.”
Corporate travel is a “mammoth area of spend” for businesses, she added.
Last 12 months, TravelPerk raised $104 million in enterprise funding from SoftBank and others to ramp up its investments in the event of AI technology and products.
Later within the 12 months the corporate subsequently raised an additional $135 million in debt financing and bought AmTrav, a Chicago-based corporate travel booking software firm, to assist it expand within the U.S. market.
The corporate subsequently raised an additional $135 million in debt financing and bought AmTrav, a Chicago-based corporate travel booking software firm, in June to assist it expand within the U.S. market.
“We predict this can be a very big market. We have sized it at about $200 billion, between the U.S. and Europe, of directly addressable market, SME and mid-market,” Carolina Brochado, found partner and deputy head of EQT’s growth fund, told CNBC.
“We predict that, out of that $200 billion, about half of that’s unmanaged. So, it’s you and me at an organization going to Booking.com for the hotel, going to Expedia for the flight. It is a very fragmented, disjointed experience.”
Despite reaching scale with over 1,500 employees and a $2.7 billion valuation, Taunay-Bucalo said TravelPerk is in no rush for an IPO and is primarily focused on keeping customers joyful.
“There is no such thing as a plan within the short term for it,” he said. “We wish to be here in 100 years … We now have this almost unusually long-term view for a tech company. And as a consequence, the best way we see the world is slightly bit different. We don’t need to do these quick things after which get out.”
Not fearful about AI ‘agents’
Taunay-Bucalo said TravelPerk will proceed investing in AI to boost its product offering and that the Yokoy acquisition will bring an “extremely strong AI team.”
Devis Lussi, Yokoy’s chief technology officer, previously worked on the Swiss-French particle physics laboratory CERN.
TravelPerk’s technology chief is not concerned by the emergence of so-called “agentic” AI, which refers to systems that may perform actions autonomously on people’s behalf as an alternative of counting on prompts.
Last week, OpenAI released Operator, an AI agent that may perform tasks comparable to planning vacations and making restaurant reservations on a user’s behalf.
“The fact is, things don’t change overnight,” said Taunay-Bucalo, discussing OpenAI’s Operaor announcement.
“Anything that we see is occurring, we’re going test it,” he added. “We will test it. We will release it. If it really works, we keep it. If it doesn’t work, we kill it.”
