Heading into 2025, I knew that this year was going to be special for TravelPerk. 

2024 exceeded all of our expectations: we acquired AmTrav super-charging our US expansion, we grew revenue by 60%, we saw a booking being made on TravelPerk every 7.5 seconds, and we re-built the company as AI native, resulting in us doubling our gross-margins.

These milestones didn’t just move us forward but set the stage for something even bigger. 

As a company, we’ve been talking a lot about our journey from good to great. It's a huge focus for us this year, and nothing kicks that off in a better way than today’s announcement: our Series E funding at $2.7 billion valuation, alongside our acquisition of Yokoy and move to become the leader in integrated travel and expense management.

Why is TravelPerk expanding into Expense Management this year?

TravelPerk was born 10 years ago, this year, and since the beginning, we have always focused on providing 7-star service, and meeting the changing needs of our customers. As our relationship with Yokoy and other partners have grown over the last few years, we have heard more and more that customers were having to make hard trade-offs—an integrated solution OR two separate best-in-class travel and expense management solutions, a platform delivering a great end-user experience OR one optimizing the experience for Finance. 

We believe that our customers shouldn’t have to compromise. 

Our acquisition of Yokoy, will bring us one step closer to achieving our ambition to provide the world's best integrated travel and expense platform—which is deeply localized, totally flexible and intuitive and easy to use.

So, why Yokoy?

Yokoy, is a market-leading spend management platform in Europe providing AI-powered expense, invoice, and card payment processing. They are a company we’ve admired and worked with since 2020. We have already partnered to offer travel and expense management tools to customers such as Breitling, On Running, and Medskin. 

Our companies bring complementary strengths to the table, but perhaps most importantly, our cultures are very aligned too, which is something I, plus Phil and Devis, two of the co-founders at Yokoy, all highly value. 

We share a common vision for the role of AI reshaping the future of travel and expense management, and as a team we have been seriously impressed by the tech coming out of Yokoy’s AI labs in Zurich. In a world of much AI-hype, they stand out from the crowd as real pioneers. In fact, Yokoy’s name is inspired by the Japanese word “yoko” – “side by side“, which reflects their mission to build technology that works alongside people instead of replacing them.

Given our relationship to-date, and our joint vision for the future of integrated travel and expense management, we are excited to come together as one company. 

While we’re so excited about what we’re building with Yokoy, 7-star service will always be at the centre of what we do. We know that there are situations when customers may need or want to use different expense management solutions. Because of that we plan to maintain and invest in our open partner ecosystem, taking some key partnerships even further this year—more to come soon!

Series E

And if that wasn’t enough to start the year with, we’ve also just announced our new $200m Series E funding, which has almost doubled our valuation to $2.7 billion. The investment was led by Atomico, alongside EQT, with significant participation from existing investors, including Kinnevik and General Catalyst. We have no plans to slow down, so will use the funding to further accelerate our growth—with continued investment in the US market alongside making significant investments into product, technology and AI. 

We're grateful to our new investors for their confidence in TravelPerk and to our existing investors for their support over the past decade. 

I knew our 10th year was going to be special, and we still have 11 months to go, so let’s see what else we can do!