TripActions skyrockets to $4 billion valuation just months after earning unicorn status with backing from Andreessen Horowitz's new $2.2 billion Vision Fund competitor
- On Thursday, corporate travel startup TripActions announced it secured $250 million in Series D funding from Andreessen Horowitz's newly announced $2.2 billion growth fund.
- The round values TripActions at $4 billion just months after it reached the $1 billion valuation mark with its Series C round in November.
- TripActions cofounder and CEO Ariel Cohen told Business Insider that Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George was "very proactive" in pulling the investment together and that the team hadn't yet spent the full $154 million in Series C funding.
- Cohen also said that while his team has a "relationship" with SoftBank's Vision Fund, they wanted to keep the deal terms simple and board involvement limited by going with an existing investor.
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TripActions cofounders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig took turns toasting to their team's accomplishments at Quince, a three-star Michelin restaurant in San Francisco's upscale Jackson Square neighborhood, on Tuesday.
Fresh off trips across Europe, the duo had a lot to celebrate: their four-year old corporate travel startup landed $250 million from VC firm Andreessen Horowitz at an eye-popping $4 billion valuation, officially announced Thursday.
"If we can raise money with good terms, why not," Cohen told Business Insider.
The funding, officially the team's Series D round, comes just eight months after a $154 million Series C in November that valued the company at $1 billion.
Cohen compared TripActions' rise, meteoric even by Silicon Valley standards, to Netflix when it was first taking on Blockbuster. He said current corporate travel vendors and travel agents may have 50 years of market experience on Cohen and Twig, but TripActions is easier to use and less of a headache for the end user: the employees.
"We think we can take the market, but we need all the means possible to do that," Cohen said.
TripActions is the latest in the parade of startups raising late-stage funding rounds in close succession, with credit card startup Brex and identity management vendor Auth0 among the growing pool.
An aggressive courtship
Cohen explained that the team wasn't looking to raise and hadn't depleted the $154 million from November's Series C. Instead, he said Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George, now leading the firm's new $2.2 billion growth fund, aggressively pursued the team. George even sent Cohen pictures of his children to help "soften" Cohen during negotiations, according to George's account at Tuesday's dinner.
"I don't know if it worked, but I think it might have," George said.
Cohen wanted to keep the board small, he said, and so he and Twig weren't planning on bringing on new investors. Andreessen Horowitz led the $154 million round in November, and had access to the team's data and growth statistics that Cohen believes convinced them to up the ante. That didn't stop Cohen from exploring other possibilities, he said.
"[SoftBank] is always a question," Cohen told Business Insider. "We have a relationship with them and had been talking in the past, but in the end we were able to choose investors and we chose who we are comfortable with."
With another $250 million on the balance sheet, Cohen believes that TripActions will have enough cash on hand to accelerate the team's go-to-market strategy and bolster the team's ambitious hiring goals. According to Cohen, TripActions has $1.1 billion in travel expenses under management between 2,000 customers.
"We think about how many customers do we have, are people happy, and are users getting the right service, but these numbers are real," Cohen said. "We are really saving them and that's why they're coming to us."