As the global corporate travel market continues to grow, Spanish startup Triporate is fast replacing the traditional business travel agent, by using natural language processing (NLP) technology to extrapolate business travelers' transport and accommodation preferences from emails to create personalized travel itineraries.
Launched in 2017, Triporate manages each part of the travel itinerary within a company's travel policy parameters. This includes booking anything from flights, trains or taxis, hotels, serviced apartments or AirBnB accommodation, as well as managing billing and expenses and compounding them into a single monthly invoice. Algorithms are also used to research and compare results on multiple travel solutions,
Triporate says its platform can manage bookings 8–10 times faster than traditional travel agents, enabling it to achieve a near 0% churn rate, meaning it has never lost a customer. The startup currently has more 100 clients, each with a staff count ranging from 10 to 500.
Last week, Triporate raised €1.3m from existing investors Murcian seed fund Aurorial and Spanish bank Bankinter, as well as new investors Reus Capital, Canarian investment fund Archipelago Next, Murcian investment fund Tokavi and the Travel Tech 1 fund of Top Seed Lab. The startup last raised €266,000 within an hour on crowdfunding platform Startupxplore in August 2018. The campaign attracted 36 investors including frequent users of its services, such as Angel Zamora of Zamora Company, a wines and spirits group in Spain.
The global business travel market is predicted to grow 4.1% to $1.66tn by 2023 from 2017. In Spain, the corporate travel sector was worth €18bn in 2016. Within six months of launching, Triporate expanded to Germany and Holland as many accounts demanded support in other European hubs.
Triporate's founding team formed within the Demium Startup accelerator programs in 2016. The project idea was first presented by Ernesto Cohnen, a former product VP at leading Indian travel search and planner marketplace Ixigo, and Sergio Orzoco, an entrepreneur with over 10 years of marketing experience across various industries.
To complete the team, Asier Vitorica was brought in and made responsible for defining and tracking business KPIs and controlling the projet roadmap, while former PWC executive Francisco Vieria, who has experience in auditing, financial control and IFRS in both Spain and Latin America, was appointed CFO.
Triporate also relies on partnerships with key industry players such as AirBnB, Booking.com, Melia Hotels and Skyscanner, as well as Spain's national air carrier Iberia and national railway company Renfe. It is a network that can be expected to grow as the company moves to strengthen its market position and expand further into European markets in the coming months.
In 2018, Triporate won a place in Google's Madrid Campus Residency, which accepts eight companies yearly for personalized guidance from the tech giant's network of industry experts and other extensive resources. The Triporate platform currently uses Google AI and TensorFlow, an open source library for machine learning used by Google in research and production.
