The first thing Prashant Kirtane, CEO and co-founder of Travelstop, did when he and his team of 26 moved into the Wego office in Singapore was to buy his own coffee machine, even though there were already two coffee machines, laughed Ross Veitch, CEO and co-founder of Wego. “I am used to my own brand of coffee,” said Prashant.
Now whether you could read this as a sign of the independence Prashant intends to maintain following the acquisition of Travelstop by Wego, announced today, it is clear that both co-founders are extremely at ease with each other.
For Wego, the largest online travel marketplace in the Middle East and North Africa, the acquisition of Travelstop, a platform that simplifies business travel and expense management for companies, expands its reach into business travel and expense management. For Travelstop, the acquisition will allow it to tap into Wego’s regional network and develop new solutions to further disrupt the unmanaged corporate travel market.
Catching up with the two co-founders at the Wego office, I had a sense that this deal seemed almost destined – it felt almost like a reunion of two like-minded, product-oriented executives. The two worked together during early days at Yahoo. Veitch was an investor in Prashant’s earlier startup, Travelmob, from which the Australian entrepreneur made a “amazing exit” when it was sold to HomeAway.
The acquisition gives Wego further reach into the corporate travel market, a vertical it had been eyeing. Veitch estimates that 30% of Wego’s business comes from unmanaged business trips and corporate travel also accounts for 30% of the travel market in both Asia Pacific and Middle East.
“This increases our addressable market substantially, by 50%,” he said. “Travelstop will operate independently under PK and his team although in a few weeks, we will make another announcement.”
For Prashant, it gives his startup the fuel to realise his initial ambition of being the first Asian corporate travel player to reach unicorn status. “I always had the vision to get to a billion dollar valuation, that was our intent, and the possibility is really high now.
“Now we can expand to the Middle East – we were growing there organically without much investment – and we can also invest in building more solutions for the unmanaged segment which forms 90% of the market in Asia.”
He started Travelstop in March 2019 and in June that year, raised US$3m in pre-Series A funding. It was all set to raise a serious Series A round in first quarter 2020 when the bottom fell out of travel.
“The pandemic made it really difficult for us, and actually our discussions with Wego started during then. I was coming to Ross for advice and we were swapping notes on survival strategies, and crying on each other’s shoulders.”
From there, discussions went on to how they could complement each other. Said Veitch, “We started to realise that it made a lot of sense to bring the businesses together. There were a lot of synergies.
“PK and his co-founder Vijay are great operators. It’s amazing what they’ve built with the small team they have – their products stack up against those of the big guys, they are best in class.
“Travelstop was growing in the Middle East without really trying. In the Middle East, most of the corporate booking tools TMCs are using are nothing like the B2C products that people are used to and most don’t have self-booking tools. For the under 40, having to email someone to book their flights, that’s bizzare.
“We have an opportunity to build something big together in corporate travel.”
Said Prashant, “We will bring our leisure travel experience to corporate travel with customisations done for corporate policies. When we started, it was for small businesses but as we have grown, our sweet spot is companies with about 2,000 employees or so.”
Both also believe that their companies’ pan-regional approach, supporting multi-languages and multi-currencies, is also a good model for the two regions of South-east Asia and the Middle East.
On the issue of baking sustainability into corporate booking tools, Prashant said smaller businesses were more focused on efficiency, pricing and costs at the moment. “However for the medium to larger sized companies, it is becoming more important and it’s a work in progress to build those product features.”
Veitch said this was also something Wego and Travelstop could work on together. “Carbon budgets and accounting around that is going to move quite quickly, and we can pool our resources to move on this.”
You can imagine both will also be pooling ideas and resources on how to apply AI and machine learning to the businesses. Prashant said Travelstop had been using AI and machine learning to solve specific needs of corporate travel – for example, expense management tools to make it easy for employees to scan receipts in real time, in different languages, as well as optimizing interfaces for individual employees when they log in.
“Now we want to solve customer support issues and having the Wego customer care team in Cairo will help us greatly.”
For Veitch, AI could help with making better recommendations. “For example, we have a lot of repeat journeys, where employees are following in the footsteps of colleagues, which flights they booked, where they are staying. You don’t really need LLMs to build it, but it will make it more powerful.”
And that is ultimately what both co-founders want from this acquisition – to build a more powerful Travelstop, together, to take it to unicorn level.
