TravelPerk President on What's Next After Raising $200 Million

TravelPerk is doubling down in the U.S. and starting a major product revamp. 

Those are two reasons why the company recently raised $200 million, according to Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, TravelPerk president and chief operating officer. 

While the Barcelona-based corporate travel agency offers a platform to book and manage travel, clients have to connect with third-party software if they want expense-management services. Now, TravelPerk is building an expense-management product into its core platform. 

“We really believe that once we merge this platform together and we can offer this choice to the customer, that's going to be a very, very big needle mover in the market, because that's what the customer expects: An all-in-one [travel and expense platform] that can handle the different types of currency and regulation you have in in multiple countries in the world,” Taunay-Bucalo said.

The expense management tech is coming from the startup Yokoy, which TravelPerk acquired recently. 

Skift spoke with Taunay-Bucalo about the company’s plans.

The Decision to Raise More Money

When TravelPerk raised $104 million in 2024, CEO Avi Meir told Skift it hadn’t been the plan, but he changed course so the company could invest in new tech and expand faster. 

Taunay-Bucalo said it was a similar situation this time, and the company was able to identify investors who could help.

• “We start all our presentations by saying we want TravelPerk to be there in 100 years. And as a consequence, the way we see financing, IPO, and so on is as steps on the journey. We were profitable at some point during this year, then we decided to reinvest more. That means we are fully capable of being profitable should we want to do it.”
• “That means we control our destiny, and as a consequence, the choice of the type of financing we get … depends also heavily on the market. We want to be independent, and we always want to control our destiny, so we always put ourselves in a situation where our balance sheet is really strong, our burn is really low.”
• “If we find an amazing investor that understands our long-term vision, then, yes, we will raise. If we don't, then we don’t need the raise, per se, so we will just continue our business.”

Expanding in the U.S.

TravelPerk acquired Chicago-based agency AmTrav in 2024, which gave TravelPerk 1,000 new clients and made the U.S. its top market for revenue. 

• “We are very clearly seeing a lot of traction in the U.S., so we want to continue to double down.” 
• “The level of detail and attention that the Amtrav team is bringing us allows us to uplevel our entire platform for the U.S. market. And we are seeing the result in customer demand, in customer conversion, in extended lifetime value. And that has propelled us to think that if that works, we definitely want to accelerate.”

What’s Coming After Acquiring Yokoy

TravelPerk and Yokoy had been partners before the acquisition, which has allowed TravelPerk clients to easily access Yokoy as an add-on for expense management. 

Now, the biggest project of the year is integrating the two platforms into one, Taunay-Bucalo said. 

• “Within 2025, we are actually going to merge the platform together so that the customer will be able to choose either travel or expense or both. We will keep the choice open, because we don't believe in the one-size-fits-all. Needs are very different. But it's going to be one platform, one mobile app.”
• “What we have realized is what customers are expecting is either an all-in-one or a very, very tightly integrated solution. The world of shallow integration between travel and expense is kind of gone now.”
• “The Yokoy acquisition is bringing us, actually, a lot of extremely talented people in AI.”

Integrating Tech Post-Acquisition 

Even though TravelPerk plans to integrate the new platform, that typically is not what the company has done. The company acquired Click Travel, for example. TravelPerk kept both platforms but integrated Click’s best features into the core product. 

• “Ultimately, the TravelPerk platform is really where most of the investment is going, but we use the other platforms that are highly localized as either an inspiration, or sometimes we literally take the code, integrate it into TravelPerk.”
• “They were and they still are amazing with train. They do split ticketing, a lot of detail in train. And train in the UK is very hard to do, extremely hard to do. At the time, frankly, we didn't do train that well. It was a very new vertical for us, and so we rebuilt the entire train vertical from scratch, taking Click as an inspiration and even sharing some of the code between the two platforms.”
• “Now, we are doing exactly the same for the AmTrav platform. As an example, AmTrav has a wonderful seat map where you can choose your seat; you can see exactly how your seat is being designed, how it faces. Same thing: We take it, we integrate it.” 

Adopting New AI

One of the reasons TravelPerk has raised more funding over the past year is so that the company can further integrate AI. 

• “We have an in-house AI trainer. We put not only our software engineers — we also put some sales people, some customer care people — through AI training. Because our logic is: It's a very new market, so you want to have people who can decipher what is hype, what is real.”
• “We actually found that the best use cases were in back-office automation.”
• “We have actually sometimes deployed also in customer facing. We deployed it, for example, in reporting, but the reality is, it was liked by our customer, but it didn't take off as much as we wanted.”

How TravelPerk Does Business

The company has never made an acquisition for market share alone, Taunay-Bucalo said. It’s always been a package deal along with tech and staff, and that’s why TravelPerk prefers to have a relationship with a company before buying it. 

• “We have never done a deal so far where somebody is ready for sale and it's a bidding war. They exist, these deals — we always move away from them, because that's just not how we like to do business. It goes back to our motivation: People, then tech, then market share. And to really understand the people and the culture, it takes time. You can't just do it out of a slide deck.”
• “We invited Yokoy to our first post-Covid summer party in 2021. They were a very new company. We had dinner with the founders. We really believe in the power of relationships, because we get to know each other; we catch up once a year; we see there is a good alignment on culture. And that makes the deal much more smooth.”

'Build, Partner, or Buy' 

TravelPerk completed its latest deals during a time of increased private equity and M&A activity in travel tech. In corporate travel, that includes consolidation of older travel agencies, as well as newer tech companies. 

As with other late-stage startups, TravelPerk has executed M&A as a way to grow more quickly. The company doesn’t have plans right now to make another acquisition. “But the reality is we might still do one," said Taunay-Bucalo.

• “Very clearly, in business travel, you are having a very small number of players that are detaching themselves from the mass that are tech-driven. I think once you start having that, then people like us look at adjacency. How can we use our distribution and how can we deliver more value to our customer? And for that, it's always the same dynamic: Build, partner, or buy.”