Business travel management and data platform TravelPerk raises $160M

TravelPerk, a business travel booking and management platform that gives companies data and insights into their spending, has raised $160 million in a series D round of funding led by Greyhound Capital.

The raise comes shortly after rival TripActions raised $155 million at a $5 billion valuation. But TripActions had pivoted from being a purely business travel management platform to offer a broader expense management toolset — a move made that made sense, given the pandemic’s disruption to the global travel industry. TravelPerk, on the other hand, has mostly elected to stick to its core proposition.

Reports

Founded out of Barcelona, Spain in 2015, TravelPerk serves up tools for booking and managing business trips. This includes finding and reserving flights and hotels, centralized invoicing, and — crucially — expense reporting. The tools allow admins to track travel spend in real time by project, team, date, and location, among other criteria.

“We also offer a carbon footprint report,” TravelPerk cofounder and CEO Avi Meir told VentureBeat. “Customers can view their CO₂ impact in real time for all their travel, not just flights, and if they choose to use GreenPerk they can automatically offset the carbon footprint for all of their corporate travel.”

Above: TravelPerk

Through its open marketplace, companies can integrate with third-party services, including Expensify, Divvy, Slack, Zoom, and OneLogin.

Although TravelPerk hasn’t gone down any major pivot route over the past year, as others in the space have, it hasn’t remained still either. Instead, the company has enabled a new flexible booking tool that guarantees refunds on cancelled trips and launched a risk-management API that provides up-to-date information on COVID-19-related guidelines and restrictions. Perhaps most interestingly, the company launched an open API that enables its customers and partners to develop customized integrations and applications.

“This open approach is fundamental to our strategy and a key part of our long-term mission to set new standards for business travel and deliver the best possible experiences to travelers and businesses,” Meir added. “We believe that TravelPerk can become the go-to platform for anyone that wants to build new and exciting travel apps.”

Return

TravelPerk had previously raised around $133 million, and with another $160 million in the bank the company is now well-financed to cater to global business travel as it gradually cranks into gear.

“Travel is definitely coming back — we can see that already with the numbers,” Meir said. “In the U.S., for instance, we can see a 70-75% recovery in domestic flights compared to the baseline before COVID. In Europe, it’s a little less certain right now, as vaccine rollout isn’t as fast, but you can look to other parts of the world and with some degree of certainty predict what the European recovery will eventually look like.”

Although Meir is confident travel will recover, it might look a little different in the future — which is why he hinted that the company is working on some new things.

“Overall, travel will make a full comeback because the meetings that matter happen in person, but the travel industry will be very different, and we’re building the products for that future,” Meir said.