{"id":14553,"date":"2019-03-26T16:53:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/lola-com-raises-37m-to-take-on-sap-and-others-in-the-world-of-business-travel.html"},"modified":"2019-03-26T16:53:39","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:53:39","slug":"lola-com-raises-37m-to-take-on-sap-and-others-in-the-world-of-business-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/lola-com-raises-37m-to-take-on-sap-and-others-in-the-world-of-business-travel.html","title":{"rendered":"Lola.com raises $37M to take on SAP and others in the world of business travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion opportunity<\/a>. Lola.com<\/a> \u2014 a platform for business users to book and manage trips \u2014 has raised $37 million<\/a> to continue building out its technology and hire more talent as it takes on incumbents like SAP targeting the corporate sector.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Series C is led by General Catalyst <\/a> and Accel, with participation from CRV, Tenaya Capital and GV. All are previous investors. We are asking about the valuation but it looks like prior to this, the company had raised just under $65 million, and its last post-money valuation, in 2017, was $100 million, according to PitchBook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are signs that the valuation will have had a bump in this round. The company said in 2018, its bookings have gone up by 423 percent, with revenues up 786 percent, although it\u2019s not disclosing what the actual figures are for either.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs business travelers have become increasingly mobile, Lola.com\u2019s mission is to completely transform the landscape of corporate travel management,\u201d said Mike Volpe<\/a>, CEO of Lola.com, who took the top role at the company last year. \u201cThe continued support of our investors underscores the market potential, which is leading us to expand our partner ecosystem and double our headcount across engineering, sales and marketing. At the core, we continue to invest in building the best, simplest corporate travel management platform in the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-founded by Paul English and Bill O\u2019Donnell \u2014 respectively, the former CTO\/co-founder and chief architect of\u00a0the wildly successful consumer travel booking platform Kayak \u2014 Lola originally tried to fix the very thing that Kayak and others like it had disrupted: it was designed as a platform for people to connect to live agents<\/a> to help them organise their travel. That larger cruise ship might have already said, however (so to speak), and so the company later\u00a0made a pivot<\/a> to cater to a more specific demographic in the market that often needs and expects the human touch when arranging logistics: the business user.<\/p>\n

Its unique selling point has not been just to provide a pain-free \u201cagile\u201d platform to make bookings, but for the platform\u2019s human agents to be proactively pinging business users when there are modifications to a booking (for example because of flight delays), and offering help when needed to sort out the many aspects of modern travel that can be painful and time consuming for busy working people, such as technical issues around a frequent flyer program.<\/p>\n

Lola.com is not the only one to spot the opportunity there. To further diversify its business and to move into higher-margin, bigger-ticket offerings, Airbnb has also been slowly building out its own travel platform targeting business customers<\/a> by adding in hotels<\/a> and room bookings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million<\/a>), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin<\/a>), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion<\/a>), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.<\/p>\n

Lola.com has made some interesting headway in its own approach to the market, by partnering with one of the names most synonymous with corporate spending, American Express, and specifically a JV it is involved in called\u00a0American Express Global Business Travel.<\/p>\n

\u201cLola.com offers an incredibly simple solution to corporate travel management, which enables American Express Global Business Travel to take our value proposition to even more companies across the middle market,\u201d said Evan Konwiser<\/a>, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for American Express GBT, in a statement.<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/oP4jvxNkXIs\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-14553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t