TripActions raises again, $250M round going to aggressive growth plan

Just four years from its founding, business travel platform TripActions has raised a Series D round of $250 million.

The company’s valuation is now put at $4 billion. This latest investment comes less than eight months after TripActions' Series C round last November which brought in $154 million.

Total funding to date is more than $480 million.

Like the Series C, this round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz (known as a16z) as part of its new $2 billion late-stage venture fund announced in May that managing director Scott Kupor wrote in a blog post is intended for companies “executing on unusually big visions for emerging categories.”

Additional participation comes from Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Group 11.

“We’re proud to have TripActions - a platform loved by enterprises and their employees alike - as a cornerstone investment in our new late stage venture fund,” says David George, general partner, a16z.

“With its combination of the most advanced global infrastructure and unmatched customer support, it’s no wonder TripActions has achieved hyper growth while maintaining a remarkable 93% traveler satisfaction. If an organization isn’t on TripActions, it will be soon as there’s nothing that comes close in business travel.”

TripActions says it has had 5x year-over-year growth and now manages more than $1.1 billion in annual travel budgets for more than 2,000 customers around the world, including WeWork, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Complex Networks and others.

Co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen says the company will use the funds to expand to new markets around the world - it currently has more than 700 employees in nine offices, primarily in the United States and also in London, Amsterdam and Sydney – and to continue improving the technology.

One area slated for future development - alternative lodging.

“It’s definitely going to be a future investment of TripActions to go deeper there in terms of how we show alternative lodging in the user experience,” Cohen says.

“Right now we kind of predict it in the way we predict hotels, but we definitely have plans to show it in a really interesting way in the future and definitely we are working with some of the alternative lodging vendors on future partnerships.”

Machine learning

Cohen attributes the company’s fast growth to its focus on user experience for both business travelers and travel program administrators.

For travelers, the system uses machine learning – including an analysis of property photos - to filter results such as flights and hotels based on the likelihood they will interest the user.

“It’s highly personalized. What we see is that in more than 85% of the cases you will end up booking one of the top three results we show you,” says Ilan Twig, co-founder and CTO of TripActions.

The company’s support agents have access to the same machine learning models, enabling them also to provide personalized results to users they communicate with via chat and email.

On the administration side, Cohen says the system can be deployed in just a few days and the high adoption from users enables managers to have broad visibility into their company’s travel spend.

“The duty of care is being taken care of simply because the users chose to adopt the system,” Twig says.

Innovation and partnerships

In recent months TripActions has made several updates, including a new flight booking interface based on ATPCO’s Next-Generation Storefront standards, free in-app flight exchange and an integration with IATA’s New Distribution Capability industry standard launched in partnership with United Airlines.

The company plans to invest further in platform updates and partnerships.

In early June, TripActions announced a white label partnership with business payment and expense platform Divvy and Tuesday it announced a partnership with human resources platform Namely.