Business travel booking and management platform Travelperk has announced that it has raised £15 million in a series B funding round led by Berlin-based Target Global and London’s Felix Capital.
CEO Avi Meir and CPO Javier Suarez founded Travelperk in 2015 to ‘reinvent’ business travel. According to VP of marketing Gideon Pridor, Meir sold his first company to Booking.com and it was while working at the online firm that he realised there was a niche for taking a more consumerised approach to business travel.
Since its start, Barcelona-based Travelperk has grown to more than 100 employees serving more than 1,000 customers. It was ranked the fastest-growing Service as a Software (SaaS) company in Europe on the SaaS 1000 list. It has seen revenue growth of 1,200 per cent year-on-year.
The platform is free to use for customers, with Travelperk receiving its revenue through partnerships with suppliers. It allows users to build their travel policy into the software so that when employees search for flights and hotels they’ll be told what’s on programme. Users can then book through the platform, which creates analytics for travel managers to identify leakage.
Speaking to BBT, Pridor said the strategy for Travelperk is focused on scaling to meet the needs of its customers. “We see an opportunity to grow very big very fast. Our strategy is to grow independently and keep the various aspects of the business in-house.”
Travelperk plans to use the new funding to recruit software engineers, product owners, sales reps and customer support agents. It hopes to double the size of its team and establish local offices in three to five new countries by 2019.
So far Travelperk integrates with major hotels, airlines and rail companies, as well as travel sites such as Booking.com, Expedia, Skyscanner and Airbnb. Pridor said part of the platform’s growth strategy is to connect with more partners to offer more diverse content to its customers.
CEO Avi Meir commented: “Almost everyone you speak to who has travelled for work has personal experience of how painful business travel can be. Until now, businesses had to choose between two bad options: either antiquated enterprise solutions or an alphabet soup of ad hoc consumer tools. We went back to first principles instead to design the world’s best experience for travellers, business administrators and finance managers alike.”
Antoine Nussenbaum, partner at Felix Capital, said: “At Felix Capital we have a high conviction about a new area of consumerisation of enterprise software. With a seasoned and highly ambitious management team combining all the skills required to build both a top-class tech stack and a smooth consumer experience for travellers through personalisation and mobile, Travelperk is ideally positioned to be the global leaders in the space.”
travelperk.com