Barcelona-based TravelPerk was founded in 2015 to streamline business travel – cutting the time it takes companies to plan a business trip from a few hours to just ten minutes. The startup has been steadily scaling, and counts major unicorns such as Farfetch, Adyen, Transferwise, and GetYourGuide among its customers. For more background on the company, check out our recent interview with its co-founder and CEO, Avi Meir.
TravelPerk has now raised €53 million after raising €38 million last October, bringing its total Series C round to €92.5 million. The follow on funding came from the same investors -Kinnevik, Partners of DST Global, Target Global, Felix Capital, Sunstone, and LocalGlobe.
Currently, TravelPerk’s platform hosts the world’s largest bookable travel inventory, allowing travellers to seamlessly compare, book and invoice trains, cars, flights, hotels and apartments from a range of providers including Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia, Booking.com, and Airbnb.
TravelPerk says it plans to use the investment on product development, releasing additional products in the coming weeks and months to give business travellers greater freedom and flexibility, while ensuring that companies maintain control over their travel spend.
“At TravelPerk, we believe that travel is the biggest unsolved problem in business today. As a $1.3 trillion global market, it’s staggering that businesses have been stuck for so long with a status quo defined by limited inventory, inflexible booking experiences, and lousy customer support,” said Meir. “We have big ambitions for the next phase of our product development, which will see us quickly bring new offerings to market that don’t just see business travel catch up with consumer travel, but actually surpass it.”
Europe is a huge market for business travel, worth more than €222 billion annually. However it’s also one of the most complex due to its fragmented nature – with challenges including country-specific suppliers, different languages, currencies, local tax, accounting laws, and GDPR compliance. Nevertheless, TravelPerk has decided to conquer its home territory first, concentrating on continuing its European expansion.
“As a fast growing fintech business, our teams travel a lot. Before Travelperk, we were booking flights and hotels through different channels,” said Meliza Jimenez, an office manager for TravelPerk’s customer Adyen. “This was very time consuming and made accurately reporting on our travel expenses really difficult. Since switching to TravelPerk, our travelers can book their whole trip through one channel and we can easily keep track of our reporting.”
2019 has been an exceptional year for the business with a 300% increase in revenue on the platform, a 250% increase in headcount since the start of the year, and new office openings in London and Berlin. Recent strategic partnerships with Lufthansa, Trainline, Spendesk, and Expensify have further enhanced its inventory and experience.
“We are excited to see Avi and his team hitting and surpassing their objectives, as a result we are doubling up our investment as part of this large Series C,” said Antoine Nussenbaum, partner at Felix Capital. “We’re delighted to be strengthening our relationship with TravelPerk and look forward to seeing the business continue to grow. We are particularly thrilled about the new features soon to be released which will materially transform the traveller experience – building on TravelPerk’s leadership position as the new standard for business travel.”
