Backed by travel industry experts, including lead investor Steve Singh of Madrona Venture Group, TROOP makes planning corporate meetings and events easy and transparent and has raised $8M Series A Funding
TROOP, the startup that makes organizing in-person meetings easy for anyone, today announced an $8 million Series A investment round to accelerate the success of its meetings management platform. The announcement was made at the Business Travel Show Europe (Booth # BTSE222).
The round was led by Madrona Venture Group (US); other investors in the round included Epic Ventures (US), GED CONEXO Ventures (ES), All Iron Ventures (ES), Plug and Play Ventures (US), Travel Tech 1 - Top Seed Labs (ES) and Founders Factory (UK). The round was also supported by travel industry leaders including Trivago founder, Rolf Schromgens; former Egencia president Rob Greyber; former Uber COO, Barney Harford; and former SAP Concur Presidents Jim Lucier and Mike Eberhard. The company has incorporated in the US as part of the financing.
TROOP has transformed what has historically been a heavily manual and time-intensive process into a self - serve platform that optimizes location and timing choices, based on corporate CO2 goals, timing, participant home locations and other goals. TROOP quickly and easily presents a menu of options of locations for in-person group meetings. Meeting organizers can use the dashboard to visualize and aggregate data to make quick and informed decisions about group travel and collaborate with co-workers and participants. The funds will be used to build out the booking and expense functionality to provide a truly end to end service.
Started pre-pandemic, TROOP has continued to see business increase as remote teams come together for in person sessions and as business travel picks up.
“When we started TROOP, we set out to do things differently. Instead of optimizing for how the travel industry sells, we evaluated what the business travel manager at an enterprise needs. They need ease of use, data on locations, ability to optimize for a broad set of goals including sustainability, spend and timing. And most importantly the ability to collaborate with colleagues. As we grow the platform to include deep integrations with booking and expense, TROOP will enable an entirely new and disruptive approach to corporate travel.” said TROOP co-CEO Dennis Vilovic.
Founded in 2017 by co-CEOs Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer, TROOP’s mission is to make organising a meeting easy for anyone. Vilovic and Cremer, who are based in Madrid (Spain) and Johannesburg (South Africa) respectively, started the company with the goal to deliver an easy to use data-driven meetings management tool that was delightful and effective for planning and booking of small or large meetings, at companies of any size in any geography.
“Often the meeting planner is the only person working with the data; our vision for TROOP changes that. We are building a collaborative approach into the meeting planning workflow focused on saving time and money”, said Leonard Cremer, TROOP’s CTO and Co-CEO.
“As companies around the globe embrace a distributed work model, the need for groups to get together is increasing. Planning, booking, and running meetings needs to be easy, whether the meeting is a 5 person meeting in a corporate office, a hybrid meeting where some attendees are traveling while others are not, or a large conference at traditional venues. TROOP is a cloud-native platform that seamlessly integrates with modern communications services as well as the travel related content required to host successful events,” said Steve Singh. “TROOP’s approach is truly innovative and has the potential to dramatically change how corporations manage and plan group meetings.”
Singh, who is also an investor in and Chairman of Spotnana and Center, will join TROOP’s board of directors and serve as Chairman.
Hugo Fernandez-Mardomingo, Managing Partners of All Iron Ventures, adds: "Since the moment we met, Dennis and the TROOP team have been able to share a comprehensive and strategic understanding of corporate travel and events. We believe that their international experience, combined with their technical capabilities to solve this complex problem, enables them to make TROOP a must-have tool for all types of corporations from now on."
“GED CONEXO Ventures´s strategy considered investing in Spanish and Portuguese technology companies with proven traction and extremely high internationalization potential”, declares Javier Artiach Basterra, Founder and General Partner at Conexo Ventures.
"We are excited to be partnering with the Troop team as the corporate travel market moves into a new era. I’m confident that Troop is positioned well with exciting technology to be an industry leader in this space", explains Nick Efstratis, Managing Partner at EPIC Ventures.
According to Dr. Javier González-Soria and Ignacio Macías, general partners of Travel Tech 1, the first VC investor in TROOP, “TROOP has not only been able to keep growing in sales and pipeline but also has improved significantly the technology with new very interesting developments that will allow them to achieve exponential growth.”
TROOP is the only platform on the market that makes organizing in-person meetings easy for anyone mitigating risks, saving costs, and reducing carbon footprint.
TROOP is a platform that benefits everyone in any sized organisation that is involved in arranging meetings, both big and small by removing all the manual work that currently takes place to pull together pricing and availability and then supercharges it with sustainability & safety data, and much more. TROOP has been well received and been awarded multiple industry awards including the Phocuswright Innovation Award and the Disrupt Award from the Business Travel Show. For more information, please visit TROOP.