Israeli startup business travel platform TripActions, announced Thursday they had closed a $250 million Series D funding round which brings the company’s current valuation to $4 billion. The new unicorn company has raised more than $480 million in funding to date.
This financial round led by private US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Group 11 (fka SGVC).
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TripActions will use the funds to “solve the antiquated product, service, and experience of the corporate travel management industry to bring the best experience in business travel to more enterprises globally,” the statement said.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Ariel Cohen, and CTO Ilan Twig, the company manages $1.1 billion in an annual travel budget and helps over 2,000 customers worldwide reduce average booking time. TripActions has more than 700 employees across nine global offices including in Amsterdam, Chicago, Dallas, London, New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Seattle, and Sydney.
The business travel market coordinates all the booking and planning of flights, hotel rooms, car rental, coordination of arrival to conferences and the like. This is a huge market TripActions estimates at $1.5 trillion a year.
Today, most business travel bookings are made by telephone or by mail with travel agents or through intra-organizational booking systems, which in many cases have not been updated for many years.
The main player in the market is American Express credit. TripActions replaces the old-fashioned AI system for planning and ordering business trips, and charges the transaction on both sides: both the companies and the service providers.
Customers include company such as WeWork, Lyft, Chubbies, Marine Layer, SurveyMonkey, and Complex Networks. TripActions service reduce average booking time from 60 minutes down to six while achieving unprecedented corporate travel program results
“TripActions has achieved hyper growth while maintaining a remarkable 93% traveler satisfaction,” said David George, general partner, a16z. “If an organization isn’t on TripActions, it will be soon as there’s nothing that comes close in business travel.”
“When we started TripActions, we put the traveler first, working to solve all of the pains of work travel that we ourselves experienced as road warriors,” said CEO Ariel Cohen, “We wanted to give enterprises and their travelers a far better option than the status quo and hopelessness of using the same outdated and frustrating corporate travel platforms they’d always used.”
TripActions co-founders Cohen and Twig sold in 2013 the social workflow platform StreamOnce to US software company Jive for $ 15 million after raising only $ 1.5 million.
The most prominent investors in StreamOnce, Lightspeed, and private investor Oren Zeev, also invested in the new adventure in TripActions, which they launched two years later.
