Three years after the sale of Travelmob to HomeAway, co-founder Prashant Kirtane has launched his new startup, Travelstop, to become the “Slack of unmanaged corporate travel” for SMEs in Asia.
The startup, aimed at solving pain points from booking to expense management to providing data insights, launched this week in four markets – Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Bangkok – with seed funding of US$1.2 million.
Prashant Kirtane: Feels corporate travel is “completely broken” especially for SMEs.
The seed round was led by Singapore‐based venture capital firm SeedPlus, along with a leading, travel focused venture capital firm based in the US. Several industry veterans including Dan Lynn and Vikram Malhi (ex‐Expedia senior business leaders and founders of Zuzu Hospitality Solutions), David Ko (President & COO of Rally Health), and Jarrod Howe (Regional Operations Director at Hyper Island Singapore) were also part of this round of funding.
Kirtane, who co-founded Travelmob with Turochas Fuad and spent two years with HomeAway as vice president, emerging markets, has teamed up with his ex-Yahoo! and Travelmob colleagues to start Travelstop. Co-founders are Vijay Aggarwal and Altaf Dhamani.
Most of the team of 12 have worked together for the past 17 years. “I was engineer #1 in Yahoo! India and Vijay (Aggarwal, co-founder & CTO) was #2. It’s good to work with the same team because it takes time to build confidence and trust and I am lucky to work with some of the best engineers.”
The idea of Travelstop came because Kirtane feels corporate travel is “completely broken” especially for SMEs.
He told WiT: “When I was with Yahoo!, we used BCD, a mostly offline agency, and it was completely broken. Choices were limited and it was inefficient. When I was with HomeAway, we used Egencia and again it felt broken. With Travelmob, we did everything manually.
“I felt there was a huge gap to be addressed and with our SaaS background, we felt it was a perfect match for us to solve the problem. Plus with 40% of global corporate travel happening in Asia, and emerging markets coming up, it’s the right time for a company to offer a scalable corporate travel tech platform aimed at SMEs.”
There are three parts to Travelstop’s platform.
One, booking. “With machine tools and AI, we can understand what’s happening within a company – say a group of employees flying to a city at the same time annually – and we can make it easy for them to book. We can also start recommending hotels based on location.
“With SMEs, compliance is not a big thing but budget is, so flexibility is important. In Asia, younger employees prefer flexibility over constraints. A lot of effort is put into compliance but it’s not really needed for smaller companies.”
The platform now offers 200,000 hotels and 80 airlines, and it has partnerships with Booking.com and Ctrip. Currently, it does not offer transportation or restaurants but Kirtane said that could be built into the business in the future.
Two, expense management. “The idea is to make expense management simple and affordable – employees create the report and the report goes to the manager, there will be fraud checks built-in, and the money goes straight to the employee’s account.”
Third will be data insights derived from the first two processes which will “help us help SMEs be more efficient in managing their travel expenses and also help companies incentivise good behavior so that business trips become more meaningful”, said Kirtane.
There are 200,000 hotels on Travelstop platform.
As with Slack, Travelstop is onboarding customers using a bottoms-up approach. Individual travellers sign up for free and if they find it useful, they will recommend to others and their companies. Travelstop is looking at companies with 15-100 employees.
Travelstop will not charge transactional fees, instead it will make on commissions from suppliers. “At some point, we will move to subscription per active user,” said Kirtane.
Its priority is to build up the platform and get enough customers to use it so that it reaches critical mass for data to become meaningful enough.
“We want to get deeper insights from a data perspective. For example, many companies have yearly product meetings and you have 200 people going to the meetings. Approval is disjointed, you have some people who overspend and some who don’t. Companies don’t understand what’s happening on a holistic level or what are the peculiarities of individual behaviour? Could we use insights to reward good behaviour?”
Kirtane admits the challenge is “putting Travelstop in the hands of enough users”.
“Not many investors would doubt that we can build the best possible product but the challenge is, how many users can we get? We will reach business travellers as individuals, we will use SEO and SEM but we will focus on the core value of the product first – for example, you can take a picture of a receipt in Thailand and that translates directly into your expense account. Once people see how easy it is to use, they will adopt it and tell their friends.”
Travelstop platform across devices
It has hired a direct sales team to go after the grassroots of the unmanaged travel space and one low lying fruit is tech startups who appreciate tech that solves problems.
Kirtane said one key lesson he learnt from Travelmob was putting together the right team. “Your initial 10 employees decide if you succeed or fail, so we are very careful who we hire.”
He wishes he had started his entrepreneurial journey earlier, instead of staying with Yahoo! as long as he did. “I started very late with Travelmob. I had a patent on mobile advertising on SMS in 2004, I could have left Yahoo! and focused on mobile but I didn’t do that.”
The courage to leave a corporate job to start Travelmob in 2011 came “because there was a comfort level with the team such as T (T Fuad) and so the fear level wasn’t that high”.
His two years with HomeAway, meanwhile, taught him “how you really scale up 10x and to appreciate the power of organisations such as HomeAway”.
With all those learnings behind him, Kirtane is taking a bet that he and his team can make Travelstop unstoppable as the agent of change in unmanaged corporate travel in Asia.
• All images credit: Travelstop
