German startup, Lanes & Planes, the business travel and expense solution provider, has announced the completion of their Series A funding of approximately €8.9 million. The round was led by Battery Ventures, a global technology investment firm, with participation from DN Capital and current investor Connect Ventures.
The Munich-based software company, founded in 2017 by Veit Blumschein and Daniel Nolte, is one of the first 100% digital end-to-end travel management solutions that covers all aspects of business travel – from booking, to expenses, to billing. The startup serves primarily medium to large-sized companies (from 10 regular travellers or more), and consolidates all the business trip information for the accounting department to easily provide final sign-off, as well as complete VAT indication, audit trail archiving and automated sync with the company’s ERP system. By using the service, companies can save up to 30% of their direct and indirect travel spend.
While Lanes & Planes is a globally available solution, the current target market is Germany, which represents approximately a €40 billion annual opportunity. The fresh funds will be used primarily to continue strong customer growth in this market, as well as improve the product offering.
Itzik Parnafes, General Partner at Battery Ventures, said: “We have been screening the market for quite some time now and know how difficult it is to develop software that meets the high expectations of both companies on the one hand and business travelers on the other. Businesspeople today expect a consumer-like experience when booking travel for work. Veit and Daniel have achieved this impressively with Lanes & Planes’ holistic solution and they continue to push the envelope in online, corporate travel”.
Nenad Marovac, Managing Partner at DN Capital adds: “We quickly realized that this experienced founding team possesses a vast and at the same time unique domain knowledge, with a product-market strategy that matches our own management philosophy: one market at a time. This has been backed up by reference calls by customers using Lanes & Planes who have been strong advocates for the product. And we are very satisfied users for our German operations ourselves ” .
