SalesTrip defies effects of pandemic on business travel with seed investment round
SalesTrip, an expense management and travel booking software company, today announces it has raised $1.4m in seed funding. Led by Floreat Group, an independent and privately held group, investment comes in the same year the company experienced over 250% growth.
“We actively seek technology companies and platforms that have strong products with flexible and attractive business models,” said Karim Jallad, Managing Director at Floreat Principal Investing. “The COVID-19 crisis has presented unique and severe challenges to the travel and expense management technology sector, with much of business travel grounded. SalesTrip has proven the flexibility, adaptability and strength of its SaaS platform and has thrived despite the global pandemic. For this and many reasons, we are pleased to invest in and partner with SalesTrip.”
The London-based start-up, which launched in 2019, has now raised more than $3m including from founder, Manoj Ganapathy, ex-founder of billing software company InvoiceIT, which was sold to Steelbrick and subsequently Salesforce. As company expenditure comes under increased scrutiny due to the pandemic, the company is helping a variety of businesses across the UK, Europe and US to better understand travel and expense costs in the wider context of business growth.
Key to this growth is SalesTrip’s strategic relationship with Salesforce who, at their 2019 Dreamforce event, recognised the company as one of its most innovative partners across its ecosystem of 5000. The product is built natively on Salesforce’s leading cloud enterprise platform enabling expenses and business travel to be managed against specific commercial activities such as sales meetings, customer projects and marketing campaigns.
VRP Consulting, a Salesforce Platinum Consulting company and recent customer, is using SalesTrip to automate employee expenses, using real-time data insights to understand spend against client projects and overall profitability. “Whether providing consulting, outsourcing, development services or managed services, it’s critical to understand both the costs to acquire new clients and service them,” said Will Lamb, Managing Director UKI for VRP.
Other customer wins in the last six months span multiple industries and countries with companies headquartered across six countries. This includes The Brilliant Club, a UK non-profit working with students from underrepresented groups; Vestiaire Collective, a French online marketplace selling pre-owned fashion items; and Embody, Inc, a medical device company needing to adhere to Sunshine Act compliance requirements.
“Almost all areas of a business today have the data-driven insights to inform decision-making, yet corporate travel still doesn’t, even though expenses are the biggest variable cost to a business,” said Manoj Ganapathy, CEO and Founder of SalesTrip.
“For too long, company leaders have been unable to determine whether large employee expense bills contribute to revenue whether through new customer acquisition, retaining existing ones or general productivity improvements. So, in spite of the halt in travel for much of the year, we’ve been fortunate to partner with some incredible companies looking to get ahead of the competition by better controlling what are notoriously unpredictable costs. And by doing so, secure the confidence and financial backing of external investors for SalesTrip.”
The company intends to use the funds to scale operations in the US, continue to build out product integrations and increase demand across key markets.
