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TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY

Spotnana - Travel’s First Open Innovation Platform, Launches With $41 Million in Funding

Spotnana | September 24, 2021

Spotnana Technology Inc.,the first technology company to build an open global innovation platform for travel, today emerged from stealth mode and announced $41 million in funding. The funding includes a $34 million Series A led by ICONIQ and Madrona Venture Group.

“Spotnana’s cloud-native unified global platform solves problems that have plagued the corporate travel world for decades and represents a giant leap forward for all participants travel suppliers, travel management companies, organizations with traveling employees, and the travelers themselves.”

The Series A round also included participation from Mubadala Capital, Decibel VC and super angels including technology and product luminaries Gokul Rajaram - Doordash, Scott Belsky - Chief Product Officer Adobe, Jeetu Patel - EVP Cisco, Vinod Marur - SVP Engineering Databricks and Akshay Bhargava - Chief Product Officer 1Password. The Series A comes on the heels of a Seed round of $7 million raised in early 2020, from Madrona Venture Group, 8VC, and Global Founders Capital, Shah Capital and angels.

“Spotnana is re-envisioning the travel experience from the ground up. By applying a cloud native and open approach to the technology stack, our platform enables travel industry participants to build on our platform to offer their services, and work with partners,” said Sarosh Waghmar, CEO and co-founder of Spotnana. “Spotnana’s unique and modern approach enables entirely new business models for travel buyers and suppliers which are only possible on its global software-as-a-service platform.”

Founded by travel veteran, Sarosh Waghmar, CEO, and technologist, Shikhar Agarwal, CTO, Spotnana has assembled an impressive team of technology and industry leaders with deep domain expertise in the travel industry, and a desire to dramatically improve the value proposition for all participants in the travel ecosystem. Bill Brindle, the former COO of American Express GBT and HRG, serves as Vice President of Travel Operations and Steve Singh, the founder and former CEO of Concur, serves as Executive Chairman of Spotnana’s Board of Directors. In addition, with the Series A investment, Greg Stanger, General Partner at ICONIQ, joins the board. Greg formerly served as CFO of Expedia.

“Spotnana is a cloud-native travel platform designed to serve the global, multi-trillion-dollar travel industry. We serve corporate customers, travel management company [TMC] partners, technology partners and our supplier partners – all on a global basis. The Spotnana TMC service is available to our corporate customers to run and manage their global travel program. Our TMC partners are using the Spotnana platform to deliver travel management services to their customers. Next-generation leaders in the spend management, meetings management, and TMC partners, are integrating into and building value on top of our platform, for the benefit of our mutual customers. Just as importantly, we are excited to partner with suppliers from around the world that wish to deliver differentiated content, and functionality to their customers. There is a tremendous opportunity to build a global platform that can dramatically improve the traveler experience while delivering a better value proposition for every member of the travel ecosystem. I am honored to serve as Spotnana’s Executive Chairman,” commented Steve Singh, Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group.
 

“We are honored to partner with Sarosh and the Spotnana team,” said Greg Stanger, General Partner of ICONIQ Growth. “Spotnana’s cloud-native unified global platform solves problems that have plagued the corporate travel world for decades and represents a giant leap forward for all participantstravel suppliers, travel management companies, organizations with traveling employees, and the travelers themselves.”

The company’s TMC service is now live with more than 50 early corporate travel customers, providing seamless global service for business travelers and empowering administrators to manage travel across dozens of global offices from one single online dashboard.

The funding will be used to expand the services available on the Spotnana platform and to build sales, marketing, partner, customer success organizations.

About Spotnana
Spotnana, founded in early 2020 is unbundling travel with the world’s first cloud-native, open, platform for global travel innovation.

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