TravelPerk quickly adds $44M round, plans rapid expansion of business travel tech

TravelPerk has announced $44 million in Series C funding, just seven months after it attracted a $21 million round .

The investment was led by Sweden-based Kinnevik with Yuri Milner and Tom Stafford also participating.

Existing investors including Felix Capital, Target Global, Spark Capital, LocalGlobe, Suntone and Amplo are also involved in the round.

The Barcelona-based company, which wants to remove friction from booking business travel, will invest the latest funds in further growth including the opening of new offices, initially in London, followed by Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris.

A Kinnevik spokesperson says it was interested in investing in travel but that many of the obvious categories already have leaders. He adds:

"Economics can be challenging unless you control either supply - giving an inventory advantage - or demand, as customers travel infrequently and begin research on Google."

The company was attracted to TravelPerk because of its team which it sees as a "unique combination of seasoned operators across all functions of the business."

TravelPerk vice president of marketing Gidi Pridor says the track record of the investors meant "they could not be ignored."

He adds that there is the opportunity to scale faster not only in terms of the existing demand and new countries but also to attract bigger companies.

Pridor also says that in the past six months TravelPerk has attracted larger corporations including Farfetch and Bowers & Wilkins.

"We're growing naturally and getting bigger customers all the time that have travel budgets of over £10 million, we were nowhere near that a year ago."

Despite the growth, he described the biggest challenge for the company as "not replacing a competitor but replacing nothing."

TravelPerk, which was founded in 2015, is one of a breed of new startups in corporate travel which have attracted significant investment in recent months.

The startup has raised almost $75 million in total funding.

TripActions raised $51 million in Series B funding in March this year as part of its own bid to fix business travel.

A month later, Rocketrip, announced its Series C round of $15 million .