Airline retailing

Headquarters: Seattle, U.S.

CEO: Stephen Grabowski

Founding date: 2017

Investment: $8 million

Gordian Software enables online travel agencies, travel management companies, airlines and other travel companies to sell air-related ancillaries.

Founders Stephen Grabowski and Joseph Sarre

Strategic goals for 2022

We have two priorities for 2022: first, we’ll grow our team. We doubled in 2021 and plan to triple in 2022 to accommodate the demand we are seeing. We currently work with a number of huge travel brands including Priceline, Ctrip, Hopper, Lastminute.com, Kiwi.com, Travix, Otravo, Travelperk and others and are expanding many of these partnerships. We’ll also be launching a number of new partnerships in the next few months.

Second, we’ll expand the portfolio of products we support and our capability to merchandise effectively. Gordian is already driving more than $100 million of sales to our partners, and we’ll be adding support for selling and targeting products like fare family upsell, meals, lounges, priority boarding and others to drive that much higher.

Lessons learned over the last year

In 2021, we grew revenue by 15x, far surpassing our previous revenue peaks. There are a few lessons that came with this.

The first is to focus on leading indicators of opportunity. Pre-pandemic, our business was mostly international travel. In 2020, we worked closely with our existing partners and launched new partnerships with very strong domestic businesses, since we saw stronger travel performance there than the news was suggesting. That led to our 15x growth in 2021.

The second is we learned how to scale our three-day sprint cycle (called The Plan). We’d honed this as a single product team over the last few years but needed to figure out how to scale it with multiple teams as we grew through the year.