Spotnana, a leading provider of cloud-based travel technology, announced it has raised $75M in Series B funding to continue building its breakthrough travel platform. The round was led by Durable Capital Partners LP, with participation from existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Blank Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, and Mubadala Capital.
Spotnana was founded by two Indian entrepreneurs: Sarosh Waghmar, a serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of travel industry experience serving as CEO, and Shikhar Agarwal, formerly a founding engineer at ThoughtSpot, Google engineer, and IIT graduate is the company’s CTO. The new funding enables Spotnana to accelerate hiring and drive faster adoption of its Travel-as-a-Service Platform, which provides a single cloud-based technology stack to corporations, travel management companies, suppliers, and technology providers. Spotnana has raised over $100M in two years, and its employee base has more than doubled in the past year to over 200 people, the majority of which work out of offices in Bengaluru, Pune, and Mumbai.
“It’s our mission to rebuild the infrastructure of the travel industry in order to bring freedom, simplicity, and trust to travelers everywhere,” said Spotnana co-founder and CEO Sarosh Waghmar. “The infrastructure that has been in place for decades puts huge barriers between suppliers and travelers. We provide an open platform that enables the entire travel ecosystem to work together to deliver unparalleled travel experiences, similar to the way Amazon has democratized access to computing resources in the cloud. To support our explosive growth, over the next year we expect to more than double our employee base again.”
Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service Platform includes everything from consumer-grade online booking tools to a new booking engine, mid-office replacement, a new system of record for booking travel, and new data integrations for travel inventory. This new technology stack enables the travel industry to lower operating costs, accelerate innovation, and improve travel experiences. Key benefits for travelers include:
- Personalized travel booking – travelers view booking options based on their preferences and can access the same loyalty benefits available through supplier websites.
- Unbiased global content – travelers see all available inventory from global distribution systems (GDS), direct connections, and other sources, eliminating the need to shop around. Spotnana does not accept GDS incentives and does not hide or bias content to reach supplier volume targets.
- Single platform for travelers and agents – travelers save time by working with agents who see the same travel inventory, profiles, policies, and negotiated rates.
- Seamless global service – travelers receive consistent service from travel agents located anywhere in the world who have full visibility into traveler profiles and trip details.
“Spotnana is building something new that the travel industry has never seen before,” said Shikhar Agarwal, Spotnana co-founder and CTO. “We’re bringing together engineers from Microsoft, Google, and other technology leaders to build a new high-performance infrastructure for travel that leverages massive data volumes and artificial intelligence to support hundreds of millions of travelers per year.”
Spotnana’s Travel-as-a-Service Platform enables all parts of the travel industry to experience the benefits of a cloud-based technology stack:
- Corporations – can lower travel costs, reduce leakage, increase traveler satisfaction, and easily integrate their preferred technology systems.
- Travel management companies – are able to deliver a superior client experience, increase operational efficiency, unlock new revenue opportunities, and improve agent hiring and retention.
- Suppliers – gain a direct connection to travel buyers that enables personalized travel offers and an improved ability to retail ancillary services.
- Technology providers – can easily add travel bookings to their product suite or build new products based on components of Spotnana’s architecture.
“Spotnana is accelerating innovation throughout the travel industry by enabling everyone to benefit from the power of cloud computing, microservices, an open platform, and open APIs,” said Steve Singh, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group and Executive Chairman at Spotnana. “After serving as CEO of Concur for more than two decades, I’m excited to be an investor in Spotnana. No one is doing more today to tackle the hard technology problems in the travel industry in order to power better experiences for travelers around the world.”
