Travel management platform TravelPerk has announced a further
US$160 million in equity and debt funding, bringing the total it has raised to date to
US$294 million.
The company says the Series D funding, from Greyhound Capital,
will be used to focus on growth in the US and Europe, in particular, and on
product innovations designed for the changing needs of travellers and
small-medium sized businesses post-pandemic. Greyhound has investments in companies
such as fintech companies Revolut, Brex, Marqeta and N26 as well as vehicle hire company Careem.
Some of TravelPerk's growth may come from acquisition. The company has already
made two acquisitions since its launch in 2015: risk management startup
Albatross in 2020, which became the basis for its TravelSafe product launch, and
US-based competitor NexTravel in January 2021.
Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, Travelperk’s chief commercial
officer, told BTN Europe: “It is a good time to acquire and acquisition is
going to be a part of our growth but not the key part. It is important to find the
right balance. With acquisition you accelerate your go-to-market and customer acquisition
but it is incredibly important that we deploy most of the money into making our
product offering even better.”
The company said it expected to grow its 500-person team rapidly as the travel market grows through late 2021
and 2022 and claimed it had not made any layoffs during the pandemic.
When asked about the departure last year of UK country manager
Richard Viner, who has not been replaced, Taunay-Bucalo said, “The UK is a priority
and we have not done any mass layoffs. It is one of our strongest markets and we
have more people in the UK now than ever.”
TravelPerk’s CEO and co-founder Avi Meir is bullish, despite questions being raised about the future of business travel by the pandemic.
“There will always be a need for business travel. But the events of the last year have
fundamentally changed businesses’ expectations and preferences,” said Meir. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve been
constantly innovating to address the changing needs for travellers navigating
the complex travel environment
during Covid, and kept growing as a company during one of the worst crises the
industry has ever seen - doubling our travel budget under management in this
period.”
Pogos Saiadian, investor at Greyhound Capital, said,“We
believe that this is a huge long-term opportunity, and as customers ourselves,
we see first-hand the tremendous value that TravelPerk provides across organisations,
from finance to admin and the travellers themselves. The fact the company is
beating growth expectations already for this year further supports our belief
that TravelPerk is
a true market leader, and we are delighted to be supporting the next stage of
the company’s growth with this investment.”
Taunay-Bucalo added, “New investors as well as existing ones look at it on a five- to ten-year horizon. The discussion is not so much about how will we recover in 2022. Their
big picture is that business travel is a trillion-dollar market. The other
systemic change is that the pandemic will accelerate the move towards business travel
management software.”
Despite this he believes there is still a role for legacy TMCs.
“I think TMCs will always have their place because there are certain
subsets of the market that are hlghly customised where our platform won’t be an
extremely good fit. Take a Norwegian oil and gas company in the Arctic; it
makes no sense for us to work with them, where everything is custom and there
is no inventory and you need to bring a flight to them.”