Jean-Christophe Taunay-Bucalo, president and chief operating officer at TravelPerk, told CNBC venture capitalists were drawn to the firm’s growth story after it rebounded from times of struggle faced during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

TravelPerk saw revenues decline rapidly in 2020 and 2021 as most business travel came to a standstill. Revenue has since grown to around five times the size it was before Covid hit, according to Taunay-Bucalo.<\/p>\n

“Why we are doing so well now is because we had that period where you had to be strong. You had to have a good foundation, you had to be scrappy,” he said.<\/p>\n

Hillary Ball, Atomico’s growth-focused partner, said the firm was drawn to investing in TravelPerk as it’s addressing “a complex and hard problem to solve” around corporate travel.<\/p>\n

“This is a market that resurged following the pandemic,” Ball told CNBC. “In the past year, the global value of corporate travel was $1.5 trillion \u2014 that’s up by 6% relative to pre-pandemic and 2019. It’s really clear that this is a market that’s here to stay and one that’s growing.”<\/p>\n

Corporate travel is a “mammoth area of spend” for businesses, she added.<\/p>\n

Last year, TravelPerk raised $104 million in venture funding<\/a> from SoftBank and others to ramp up its investments in the development of AI technology and products.<\/p>\n

Later in the year\u00a0the company subsequently raised a further $135 million in debt financing and acquired AmTrav<\/a>, a Chicago-based corporate travel booking software firm, to help it expand in the U.S. market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The company subsequently raised a further $135 million in debt financing and acquired AmTrav, a Chicago-based corporate travel booking software firm, in June to help it expand in the U.S. market.<\/p>\n

“We think this is a very big market. We’ve sized it at about $200 billion, between the U.S. and Europe, of directly addressable market, SME and mid-market,” Carolina Brochado, found partner and deputy head of EQT’s growth fund, told CNBC.<\/p>\n

“We think that, out of that $200 billion, about half of that is unmanaged. So, it’s you and me at a company going to Booking.com for the hotel, going to Expedia for the flight. This is a very fragmented, disjointed experience.”<\/p>\n

Despite reaching scale with over 1,500 employees and a $2.7 billion valuation, Taunay-Bucalo said TravelPerk is in no rush for an IPO and is primarily focused on keeping customers happy.<\/p>\n

“There is no plan in the short term for it,” he said. “We want to be here in 100 years … We have this almost unusually long-term view for a tech company. And as a consequence, the way we see the world is a little bit different. We don’t want to do these quick things and then get out.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Not worried about AI ‘agents’<\/h2>\n
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Taunay-Bucalo said TravelPerk will continue investing in AI to enhance its product offering and that the Yokoy acquisition will bring an “extremely strong AI team.”<\/p>\n
Devis Lussi, Yokoy’s chief technology officer, previously worked at the Swiss-French particle physics laboratory CERN.<\/p>\n
TravelPerk’s technology chief isn’t concerned by the emergence of so-called “agentic” AI, which refers to systems that can carry out actions autonomously on people’s behalf instead of relying on prompts.<\/p>\n
Last week, OpenAI released Operator, an AI agent that can perform tasks such as planning vacations and making restaurant reservations on a user’s behalf.<\/p>\n
“The reality is,<\/strong> things don’t change overnight,” said Taunay-Bucalo, discussing OpenAI’s Operaor announcement.<\/p>\n
“Anything that we see is happening, we’re going test it,” he added. “We’re going to test it. We’re going to release it. If it works, we keep it. If it doesn’t work, we kill it.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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