The Madrid- and Johannesburg-based startup Troop recently closed a €6.92 million Series A funding round with Conexo Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Epic Ventures, All Iron, Plug and Play, and several other investors.
Founded in 2017 by co-CEOs Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer, Troop makes it easy for anyone to organize meetings. Vilovic and Cremer, who operate out of Madrid, Spain, and Johannesburg, South Africa, respectively, launched the company with the goal of providing a data-driven, easy-to-use meeting management tool that would also be effective for planning and booking small or large meetings, in companies of any size and in any geography.
Troop has optimised what has historically been a manual, time-consuming process into a self-service platform that optimizes location and time options. The service offered by Troop takes into account, among others, corporate CO2 targets, time, and location of participants’ homes. The startup presents quickly and efficiently a menu of location options for in-person group meetings, facilitating all processes. In this way, meeting organizers can use the dashboard to visualize and aggregate data to make quick, informed decisions about group travel and collaborate with colleagues and participants. The funding raised will initially be used to develop the booking and expense functionality so that an end-to-end service can be provided.
Created before the pandemic, Troop’s activity has increased as remote teams meet for in-person sessions, as well as increased business travel.
Troop co-CEO Dennis Vilovic stated: “When we started Troop, we decided to do things differently. Instead of optimizing the way the travel industry sells, we evaluated what the business travel manager needs in a company. They need ease of use, location data, the ability to optimize for a broad set of objectives, including sustainability, the expense and time. And most importantly, the ability to collaborate with peers. As we grow the platform to include deep integrations with booking and expense, Troop will enable a completely new and disruptive approach to corporate travel.”
TROOP is currently probably only platform on the market suitable for any user that eases the organization of face-to-face meetings, mitigating risks, saving costs and reducing the carbon footprint. During the pandemic, TROOP has tripled its clients as organizations have realized that as travel returns, they are going to be under the spotlight, with a higher need to make decisions based on facts rather than opinions related to meetings and events. In addition, as offices are being reused as meeting spaces, being able to see these spaces when planning is also key for the use of these assets.
