Travel tech firm Sojern has landed a funding round of $120 million to grow its business and enter new markets.
The round was financed by TCV, a growth equity firm that has invested in companies including Airbnb, Expedia and ExactTarget. In total, Sojern has raised $162.5 million to date.
“There’s money, there’s money and then there’s really smart money,” Sojern senior vice president Stephen Taylor says of the capital.
“This is real growth equity money [from TCV] with a ton of heritage in big players in our sweet spot: advertising technology and travel technology.”
Taylor says the funds will allow the company to invest in resources like data scientists and engineers to ensure quality of its product and spur innovation. “This is about recognizing there’s still so much to do. How can you get smarter and smarter with data? How can you help big travel companies solve complex problems around advertising and distribution and how those things come together and where they sit at in the ecosystem.”
In order to gain a comprehensive view of customers and the customer journey, Taylor says specialists are needed to look at individual channels as well as cover new markets. He says business in both the Asia Pacific and Latin American regions has been growing very quickly, but there are still markets in which Sojern wants to dig deeper.
Attracting attractions
The attractions space is becoming an increasingly bigger vertical for Sojern, Taylor says, and the company’s role is to help attractions providers understand how to work with online travel agencies as well as figure out a direct booking path.
“We can understand much more clearly than many others where attractions fit into that and how they reach the right customers.”
He compares the current state of the attractions sector to hotels 10 years ago. “I think [with our data] there are much greater ways that we can help attractions with a direct route to the consumer in a very efficient way, that 10 years ago were not really available to hotels at the time.”
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Sojern is working with one major attractions company around connected TV, and Taylor says the company is working with a number of other major players and smaller ones, as well.
It’s also developing a product that Taylor believes will be a competitive advantage. “Our ability to really help as we do 6,000 to 7,000 independent hotels, we can do similar things for attractions around the world.”
Sojern, he says, has been profitable for the past 13 consecutive quarters, and the new funds give it “the confidence to try something, to invest a little more, to experiment with something. Attractions is a good example of that.”
The acquisition front
Almost a year ago, Sojern acquired Facebook marketing firm Adphorus, and with the new money, Taylor says the company is actively exploring similar opportunities.
“The new capital and with a very strong backer puts us in an even stronger position to feel confident in spending cycles on reviewing multiple companies and opportunities,” he says.
“We try to build the things that other people haven’t built or build the connected tissue. We’re always very open to working with partners if there are people who can do things better than us.”
Taylor says at the moment there are no plans to acquire any company specifically.
A shared vision
Taylor says TCV and Sojern share the same vision: That the intersection of advertising technology and travel technology needs to happen.
“There’s a massive opportunity from the big to the small brands,” TK says. “The way consumer travel demand can most efficiently match product inventory – marketing is over here and revenue management and yield is over here – you need to get distribution and marketing closer and closer together.
“They have to get closer together for true efficiently, and only certain players are able to do that, and you can only do that if you have a comprehensive view of data.”
Only certain players have the ability to bridge distribution and marketing, and they can only do that if they have a comprehensive view of data, he continues.
“We straddle the ad tech/distribution travel tech path,” Taylor says, and what he’s found is “that actually the appetite for people to support you and get involved is really quite significant. It’s different from being a generic platform play in ad tech.”
In a statement, TCV general partner Woody Marshall says: “We have been watching Sojern’s rapid rise in the travel technology space for several years, and we were impressed with Sojern’s leadership position in the space and its unique, scalable model for influencing travelers worldwide.
“Sojern’s ability to both conceptualize a better marketing experience for travel organizations and their steady execution over the past decade, as well as their innovative business strategy, strong executive team and inspiring company culture made them a natural fit for us.”
As part of the transaction, Marshall will join Sojern’s board of directors.