TripActions, a Palo Alto-based unicorn for business travel, has secured a new half-billion dollar credit facility to help launch its second line of products. Called TripActions Liquid, the service, helps companies that do not offer company cards to employees from being forced to use their personal cards to reduce business travel costs.
Liquid plugs into the wider TripActions business travel service that theinformationsuperhighway wrote about here.
You can see where the debt fits in the news; If TripActions spends a lot of money on other companies so they can't temporarily shift travel expenses to employees' personal cards (which, frankly, should be illegal), that will mean a lot of money – money that TripActions would rather not deduct from Business equivalent of his checking account. The answer is a short-term revolving credit line – the corporate version of a high-limit credit card, only minus usury interest.
According to the company, the money comes from "Silicon Valley Bank with the participation of Goldman Sachs and Comerica Bank". Or more specifically, the dollars come from the Iron Bank of California, their east coast equivalent and Drake's credit union. Joking aside, it's a good trio that is likely to show great interest in funding TripActions' new product.
Not that the company itself is short of cash. Crunchbase has a tracked equity financing of more than $ 480 million for the company, including a $ 250 million Series D from last June (a16z, Group 11, Lightspeed and Zeev Ventures). According to Crunchbase, the company valued this round of financing at around $ 3 billion.
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According to a TripActions interview with theinformationsuperhighway, travel expenses are "the second largest expense that can be controlled by companies and most financial managers feel that they are not managing them well" employees and management for better service.
With TripActions Liquid, which helps employees avoid paying corporate expenses, and the TripActions product, which in theory makes travel booking itself a less annoying task, this news could make the lives of working companies among us less bad.
In this sense, a story. It was actually a little annoying to see how TripActions Brass members led me through a product demo during a briefing for this post. I am currently in a back and forth with various elements of my company house related to trips that I have booked through our current provider – I will not name them, but their nickname rhymes with fun purring – about whether I am inside the trip he booked the same software suite. I was curious about Liquid for the perspective of a business traveler who, as you know, has other things to do than expenses. It looked less troublesome and harmful to my mental health than what I use today.
With available spending of $ 500 million, TripActions has plenty of room to fund it.
All of this is all well and good, but when will TripActions go public with a new product? When discussing 2018 performance, the company claimed to grow rapidly in 2019. Go on!
