TripActions Inc., the startup behind a cloud service of the same name for managing business travel, today announced that it has raised a $155 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Addition Ventures and venture capitalist Elad Gil.

The round values TripActions at $5 billion. 

TripActions’ service has two main selling points: It promises to enable a company’s employees to more easily plan and book business trips, while making it simpler for finance teams to manage the associated expenses. TripActions also offers related features such as a virtual credit card for travel expenses.

The startup’s service provides access to a catalog of flight, lodging, rail and rental car options aggregated from sources such as popular travel websites. Workers can book trips via a self-service interface designed to replicate the experience provided by consumer services. For added measure, TripActions has an in-house travel agency that assists users at client organizations with planning their trips.

Finance teams, in turn, can optimize the selection of flight and accommodation options that TripActions displays for their companies’ employees based on factors such as budget requirements. The startup provides analytics tools to help finance professionals find areas to improve efficiency.

Beyond features for booking trips and tracking expenses, TripActions automates some of the back-office tasks involved in managing business travel. The startup has developed an automated trip expense reimbursement feature that doesn’t require any manual input from the finance team. Another feature allows companies to centralize bills into a single invoice to reduce manual bookkeeping work.

Now that it’s worth $5 billion, TripActions ranks as one of the highest-valued startups in the corporate travel software market. The steep valuation is particularly notable given that last March, following the big drop in global travel, the startup had to lay off between a fifth and a quarter of its workforce.

A spokesperson for TripActions told TechCrunch that the corporate travel market is operating at “20% levels as of this month.” The market is growing by 3% to 6% week over week, the startup claims, which helps explain why investors have decided to provide TripActions with an additional $155 million in funding. 

“TripActions has seen rising demand from companies looking to partner with a travel and spend management provider that can quickly innovate and help businesses better control spend,” TripActions co-founders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig wrote in a blog post today.

The company says it manages corporate travel budgets totaling more than $3.6 billion for 4,000-plus customers, including Box Inc., Lyft Inc. and other major tech companies.

Photo: TripActions