SoftBank leads TravelPerk's $104 million fundraising, in a bet that AI will reshape corporate travel

Barcelona-based startup TravelPerk, which helps automate corporate travel and expenses, has raised $104 million in fresh funding from Japanese tech investing giant SoftBank and a flood of other names, to invest in artificial intelligence development and new products.

The company said Tuesday that it raised the cash in a new equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and backed by existing investors Kinnevik and Felix Capital. TravelPerk said it plans to use the money to invest in continued company growth and product expansion.

TravelPerk primarily uses AI technologies like machine learning and neural networks in the back end to help automate a lot of the manual tasks involved in corporate travel — for example, connecting users with the best prices for flights and accommodation.

"Traditionally, if you look at legacy players, like American Express or Expedia, or holiday travel sites, most of the work is done manually by travel agents," Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of TravelPerk, told CNBC.

"This is one of the reasons why you don't really see huge success at scale with travel, because technology was not used, and technology is how you scale today."

SoftBank invested $70 million in TravelPerk's latest round, which the company said was an extension of its "D-1" funding round. The fundraising round shows SoftBank is placing a major bet on a company driving disruption in corporate travel through new technologies, such as AI — which has seen significant buzz since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

The latest fundraising round lifts TravelPerk's valuation to $1.4 billion, a touch above the $1.3 billion at which TravelPerk was assessed during its previous cash raise a year ago.

An "upround," where a private startup pulls in