Travel Startup’s Valuation Quadruples in Just Seven Months

(Bloomberg) -- When TripActions Inc. raised $154 million in November, the business-travel startup became a unicorn. Just seven months later, the company says it’s worth four times as much.

TripActions just completed a $250 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, catapulting its valuation to $4 billion, the Palo Alto, California-based company said Thursday in a statement.

The move puts four-year-old TripActions into a rarefied club of multibillion-dollar startups, with a value that exceeds even some of its cloud-based publicly traded peers. The company’s pitch is to bring the easy, mobile experience of consumer travel services to the global market for business trips. Spending in that category is slated to reach about $1.7 trillion by 2022, according to the Global Business Travel Association.

TripActions aims to compete with established business travel players, like SAP Concur and American Express Co.’s travel service, by enticing globe-trotting employees with perks. People who book through TripActions’ platform can get rewards like gift cards if they select a cheaper travel option, saving companies money.

TripActions’ revenue is now growing 500% a year and it handles $1.1 billion of clients’ travel spending, according to Chief Executive Officer Ariel Cohen.

David George, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the venture firm and the startup underwent heated discussions with Cohen and his co-founder, Ilan Twig, to arrive at a deal.  “Ariel, Ilan and I may seem like friends now, but it took a lot of negotiations to get us here,” George said. The winning solution? “I’d send photos of my young kids doing something cute" to ease the tension, George said, until the term sheet was eventually signed. 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Molly Schuetz at mschuetz9@bloomberg.net, Anne VanderMey

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