Spotnana emerged from covert Thursday with $41 million in its pocket and an open global platform targeting the $1.4 trillion business travel industry.
The Bay Area company’s investment includes a $34 million Series A co-led by ICONIQ and Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Decibel and Mubadala Capital, and an earlier undisclosed seed round of $7 million as of 2020, also from ICONIQ and Madrona, including 8VC and Global Gründerkapital.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Sarosh Waghmar and CTO Shikhar Agarwal, Spotnana develops a software-as-a-service platform for travel buyers and suppliers, aiming to automate related back- and mid-office tasks and travel inventory from dozens from global sources to provide integrations with third-party workplace technology providers for easy travel management.
Waghmar, who has a background in founding and leading the travel industry’s digital travel company WTMC, told TechCrunch that scaling in the industry is difficult because it’s “badly broken and badly fragmented.”
He learned that the only way to scale in the travel industry was to build a technology company first, so they started building Spotnana with Agarwal, not knowing that the global pandemic was just around the corner.
“Travel is a $1.4 trillion industry, and business travel alone is growing 5-6% each year, but accounted for $700 billion last year despite the pandemic,” Waghmar said. “By 2024 we see that going down to $1.4 trillion as events get back to where they need to be.”
The platform is now open to the public after being tested with more than 50 corporate travel clients managing travel across global offices, now from a single online dashboard. In addition, the company has grown to over 120 employees in the past year.
Steve Singh, former founder and CEO of corporate expense and travel software company Concur, is an investor at Madrona Venture Group and serves as Chairman of Spotnana’s board of directors. As part of the investment, he will be joined on the board by ICONIQ investor and former Expedia CFO Greg Stanger.
Singh described the company as “AWS for the travel industry”.
“Customers use Spotnana in a number of ways: they use the finished product or they take the API and build their own products,” he said. “It will be like walking into a kiosk at the airport and accessing the same records used when booking travel online or working with a travel agent.”
At his previous company, Waghmar said he scaled it as a bootstrap company to over $70 million in travel spend per year. However, he believes that Spotnana’s technology will drive change in the industry and that it will take working with investors who understand the scope to drive it forward.
The new funds will be used for additional recruitment, particularly for the engineering team, the expansion of the infrastructure for travel operations and the further development of the open architecture.
“We believe this is the highest amount ever raised for a business travel startup,” added Waghmar. “We’ve built a profitable business before, and we can do it again if we revolutionize this industry.”
