Corporate travel startup TripActions announces valuation at $4Bn

TripActions made its name in the travel sector by turning corporate travel into a fun game app, and rewarding customers who found cheaper hotel rooms through its platform with cash for personal travel or Amazon gift cards. 

Now investors are rewarding the startup’s fast-paced growth with money of their own.

Most recently, the company announced a new $250 million funding round led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz’s new growth fund alongside Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Group 11. TripAction’s valuation also quadrupled since its most recent $154 million funding round in November 2018 that valued it at $1 billion. The corporate travel startup has now raised a total of $480 million since its launch in 2015.

It’s a massive sum, but TripActions CEO and Co-Founder Ariel Cohen says he didn’t seek more money because the company was short on cash. Instead, he was asking himself one question: “Can I accelerate our growth?”

As if quadrupling its valuation wasn’t enough, now four years since its launch, TripActions now manages over $1.1 billion in trip budgets a year (actual spend, and subsequent revenues, are lower, but the company won’t disclose it). Companies like Lyft, WeWork and Sara Lee Frozen Bakery are among TripActions’ 2,000 customers, and it has partnered with other expense management companies, like Divvy, to power travel booking inside their platforms.

Offering incentives, like Amazon credit to stay in a cheaper hotel an extra few blocks away, started as a way to draw travelers to TripAction’s platform and save companies money along the way. But extra cash alone wouldn’t keep employees coming back if it was a bad experience. Instead, the company sees its superpower as using machine learning to provide a faster and better booking experience—it claims an average of six minutes from start to finish—and offering around the clock customer support for the times when things go wrong. 

TripActions works by sourcing flights and hotels largely from global distribution systems and third-party partners like Booking, Priceline and Expedia. It then narrows down the options using machine learning based on what it believes the employee might like based on information like their job title or loyalty programs on file, and shows employees what would work within their company’s travel policies. 

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