Orchestrating employees’ business trips is a formidable administrative task for companies, which is why there’s an entire ecosystem of software products dedicated to travel and expense management. TravelPerk SL, a new player taking on the segment’s incumbent providers, today announced that it raised $60 million in funding.

The investment is an extension to a $44 million Series C round the Spanish startup closed last year. Participants included Kinnevik, DST Global, Target Global, Felix Capital, Sunstone and LocalGlobe.

TravelPerk provides a cloud-based travel booking platform that competes with better-known products such as SAP Concur. The startup built its service to function as a central hub for arranging business trips. It enables companies to book flights, rental cars and trains along with several types of accommodations, from hotel rooms to Airbnb listings.

Finance teams can set up approval policies to automate the processing of employee trip requests. TravelPerk decides whether to authorize or reject a request based on predefined spending and trip duration limits, as well as other criteria such as whether an employee has provided sufficient advance notice for a flight.

More than 2,000 companies use TravelPerk to book trips. The startup claims that the number of active users on its platform has grown by 150% since the start of the year, while bookings are up 300%.

TravelPerk Chief Executive Avi Meir (pictured) wrote in a blog post that the new funding will help the startup pursue its grandiose product vision. “Our $104 million Series C is going to help us unveil some really exciting products and initiatives that we feel will reshape the way travel is priced, sold, booked, canceled, reported, all of it,” he wrote. “We don’t need to play catch-up with the leisure travel industry anymore, we can now cycle past it.”

To support the development roadmap, TravelPerk reportedly plans to more than double its workforce to more than 580 employees by the end of 2020. The hiring spree is already underway: The startup’s current headcount is 250% higher than it was at the start of the year. 

Photo: TravelPerk