Spend management platform Ramp has acquired guest travel startup Juno, with plans to have it operate independently within Ramp while supporting its own travel offering capabilities, the companies announced Monday.
Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.
Juno—developed by Devon Tivona and Sam Felsenthal, the founders of guest travel management app Pana—launched last year as a solution for coordinating, booking and managing guest travel. Over that time, it's announced attracting $6 million in funding and broadened its focus to tackle "complex travel" uses cases outside of guest travel, including meetings management capabilities.
Now with Ramp, Tivona said Juno will have additional resources to continue its growth.
If this seems like déjà vu, it's not, Tivona said. His last venture, Pana, was acquired by Coupa to serve as a technology base for its own travel module—which Coupa eventually sunset. But while Coupa never planned to continue Pana as a separate offering or as a guest travel platform, it will be "business as usual" with Juno as a part of Ramp.
"This is very different from last time," Tivona said. "We are becoming a fully owned subsidiary of Ramp, but the Juno brand is going to stick around, the Juno team is staying intact and Sam and I are staying on as co-CEOs."
In a prepared statement, Ramp CTO and co-founder Karim Atiyeh also emphasized the importance of Juno as a guest travel solution.
"Juno built something strong in a category that matters," Atiyeh said. "Our job now is to give them leverage and stay out of the way."
Ramp launched its own travel offering in 2022, and Tivona said Juno will be "supporting a strategy of deepening their travel capabilities and investing in a suite of travel products and our [travel management company] partnerships to meet now and future customer needs." Juno has forged relationships with travel mangement companies including Altour, Direct Travel and BCD Travel, and Tivona said that strategy will continue, with more partnerships planned to be announced soon.
Ramp has about 50,000 customers today and has been moving upmarket to larger clients. On Friday, Ramp announced it would expand into Europe this summer and invited companies headquartered in the U.K. and Europe to join its waitlist. Tivona said Juno will be able to support Ramp in that growth.
"As we all know, there is lots of complexity in travel programs, including integrations with travel management companies and the natural complexities that come with global travel programs," Tivona said. "These are challenges and complexities that our team has decades of experience in solving for customers, so it will be looking at what ingredients there can support a broader enterprise strategy."
Juno, meanwhile, will benefit from Ramp's expense and payment capabilities, meaning it can incorporate offerings like mobile wallets that it could not before, he said. However, Juno will remain "card-product agnostic" for companies, he added.
There also will be natural sales synergies, he said.
"Our ability to offer those as a combined offering to our customers inside one contract, and have a fully integrated travel, expense and card offering is exciting to them as well," Tivona said. "There will certainly be a cross-pollination of resources."
While Pana's exit had left a hole in the guest travel management space, it's a much more crowded space today. Besides Juno, the platform EmPath launched about the same time, and American Express Global Business Travel soon after launched its own guest platform with aims of serving travelers beyond its own clients.
As such, Tivona said the plan is to keep innovating on Juno's features and to remain a force in the market.
"This isn't going to be a scenario where you see us fire-sale the company and walk away and start something else," Tivona said. "Sam and I are building a long-term durable brand in this space, and this is simply the next evolution of our chapter to be able to do that."
The story originally appeared on BTN.