Just four years from its founding, business travel platform
TripActions has raised a Series D round of $250 million.
The company’s
valuation is now put at $4 billion. This latest investment comes less than eight months
after TripActions' Series C round
last November which brought in $154 million.
Total funding to date is more
than $480 million.
Like the Series C, this round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz
(known as a16z) as part of its new $2 billion late-stage venture fund announced
in May that managing director Scott Kupor wrote in a blog post
is intended for companies “executing on unusually big visions for emerging
categories.”
Additional participation comes
from Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Group 11.
“We’re proud to have TripActions - a platform
loved by enterprises and their employees alike - as a cornerstone investment in
our new late stage venture fund,” says David
George, general partner, a16z.
“With its combination of the most advanced global
infrastructure and unmatched customer support, it’s no wonder TripActions has
achieved hyper growth while maintaining a remarkable 93% traveler satisfaction.
If an organization isn’t on TripActions, it will be soon as there’s nothing
that comes close in business travel.”
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TripActions says it has had 5x year-over-year growth and now
manages more than $1.1 billion in annual travel budgets for more than 2,000
customers around the world, including WeWork, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Complex
Networks and others.
Co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen says the company will use the funds to
expand to new markets around the world - it currently has more than 700
employees in nine offices, primarily in the United States and also in London, Amsterdam
and Sydney – and to continue improving the technology.
One area slated for future development - alternative
lodging.
“It’s definitely going to be a future investment of TripActions
to go deeper there in terms of how we show alternative lodging in the user
experience,” Cohen says.
“Right now we kind of predict it in the way we predict
hotels, but we definitely have plans to show it in a really interesting way in
the future and definitely we are working with some of the alternative lodging
vendors on future partnerships.”
Machine learning
Cohen attributes the company’s fast growth to its focus on user
experience for both business travelers and travel program administrators.
For travelers, the system uses machine learning – including an
analysis of property photos - to filter results such as flights and hotels based
on the likelihood they will interest the user.
“It’s highly personalized. What we see is that in more than
85% of the cases you will end up booking one of the top three results we show
you,” says Ilan Twig, co-founder and CTO of TripActions.
The company’s support
agents have access to the same machine learning models, enabling them also to provide
personalized results to users they communicate with via chat and email.
On the administration side, Cohen says the system can be
deployed in just a few days and the high adoption from users enables managers
to have broad visibility into their company’s travel spend.
“The duty of care is being taken care of simply because the
users chose to adopt the system,” Twig says.
Innovation and partnerships
In recent months TripActions has made several updates,
including a new
flight booking interface based on ATPCO’s Next-Generation Storefront standards,
free in-app flight exchange and an integration
with IATA’s New Distribution Capability industry standard launched in
partnership with United Airlines.
The company plans to invest further in platform updates and
partnerships.
In early June, TripActions announced a white label
partnership with business payment and expense platform Divvy and Tuesday it
announced a partnership with human resources platform Namely.