Concur Founder Backs New Corporate Travel Startup Juno
Photo Credit: Unsplash / Ruthson Zimmerman
Skift Take
This is another startup that Steve Singh is funding with the aim modernizing all aspects of business travel.
Steve Singh, the founder of Concur, is co-leading the seed round of a new tech startup focused on a niche area of business travel.
Juno is a travel booking and expense platform for what’s known as guest travel, which involves companies coordinating travel for clients, potential hires, speakers, and other non-employees.
Devon Tivona, the co-founder and co-CEO, previously built the travel booking tool Pana, which operated in a similar space. He sold Pana to spend-management company Coupa in 2021 and then worked for the buyer for about two years.
The travel product is launching in June with around 10 customers that Tivona said includes several Fortune 500 companies. And the expense product is launching this month with a group of customers.
Guest travel can make up 20% of a company’s overall travel expenses, he said. And while there are many travel and expense tech platforms for employees, guest travel is often handled through emails and spreadsheets, and the guests often have to front the costs. It can mean unpleasant travel experiences for those guests and long wait times for expense reimbursement.
“The most strategically important trips for an organization are being coordinated in the most fragile workflow possible for corporate travel,” Tivona said.
“We had one customer say that it took them a year to get the CEO of a partner company reimbursed for a $30 meal. That’s a brand risk.”
Singh, managing director of Madrona Ventures, co-led a $2 million investment with Bungalow Ventures.
“We weren't going to raise any capital; we were going to bootstrap. We really wanted to be in control of our own destiny — and then we met Steve,” Tivona said.
Singh sold Concur to SAP in 2014 for $8.3 billion. He has invested in and taken board and advisory roles for a number of corporate travel startups. It’s all part of a greater plan, as he’s told Skift previously, to create a more seamless experience for business travel that he calls “the perfect trip.”
Mostly recently, Singh invested in the new startup Otto, designed as an AI virtual travel agent for planning and booking business trips. He and other investors last year acquired corporate travel agency Direct Travel.
Building Juno
After leaving Coupa in 2023, Livonia said a number of travel buyer contacts asked him about options for the guest travel space. He realized that there might be an opportunity there, so he did some research. He spoke with more than 40 travel buyers, and the consensus was that guest travel has become more prevalent as companies have been conducting more in-person meetings post-pandemic.
“It became really clear that there was an opportunity to build something here again, but even better than we did before," Tivona said.
Juno is targeting large companies with robust travel programs. The biggest opportunities lie in health care, life sciences, higher education, energy, sports, media, and entertainment, he said.
The company is also targeting partnerships with business travel agencies, which can integrate the Juno technology and then offer it to clients. Its first partner is Altour, which is headquartered in New York City and has operations worldwide.
The Juno tech acts as a booking software tool that lies in between the corporate travel agency and the client company.
The client inputs basic information about the traveler, and then the traveler can book and manage travel and expenses from there. The AI is meant to present a couple of flight and hotel options that account for the respective client company’s travel policies and timing of the event. When the traveler books, the company is charged. There’s also an integration with Uber for rideshare. There’s a section to upload expenses for reimbursement if needed.
If the traveler needs service from a human, then the chatbot connects the traveler with the respective agency.
Juno supports 40 currencies and 50 countries.
Juno is starting with a connection to Sabre for access to fares and hotel rates. There’s potential for Juno to join the ecosystem of Spotnana, a company that Singh has been building that aims to reimagine distribution and other parts of the tech architecture in business travel.
“What we really liked about working with Steve is that he doesn't think in years; he thinks in decades in terms of the corporate travel space," Tivona said. "So he is able to make these bets, make these investments, and then be patient as the companies grow and the technology matures.”
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