- TROOP — a startup that makes organizing in-person meetings easier — announced an $8 million Series A investment round. These are the details.
TROOP — a startup that makes organizing in-person meetings easier — announced an $8 million Series A investment round to accelerate the success of its meetings management platform. This funding round was led by Madrona Venture Group (US). And other investors in the round included Epic Ventures (US), Conexo (ES), All Iron (ES), Plug and Play (US), Travel Tech 1 – Top Seed Labs (ES), and Founders Factory (UK). The funding 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.
TROOP 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. And TROOP quickly and easily presents a menu of options of locations for in-person group meetings.
The 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. And the funds will be used to build out the booking and expense functionality to provide a truly end-to-end service. Launched pre-pandemic, TROOP has continued to see business increase as remote teams come together for in-person sessions and as business travel picks up.
Launched in 2017 by co-CEOs Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer, TROOP’s mission is to make organizing a meeting easy for anyone. And 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.
Steve Singh — who is also an investor in and Chairman of Spotnana and Center — will join TROOP’s board of directors and serve as Chairman.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
— TROOP co-CEO Dennis Vilovic
“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.”
— 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. TROOP’s approach is truly innovative and has the potential to dramatically change how corporations manage and plan group meetings.”
— Steve Singh
“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.”
— Dr. Javier González-Soria and Ignacio Macías, general partners of Travel Tech 1, the first VC investor in TROOP
