Guest travel management platform Juno has secured $2 million in seed funding as well as its first travel management company partner, Altour, in advance of a June launch, the company announced.
Juno is being developed by the team behind former guest travel management app Pana, Devon Tivona and Sam Felsenthal, to automate the still largely manual process of booking and managing travel for such guests as recruits, trainees, contractors and speakers. Through the platform, guest travelers and their coordinators are guided through the full travel process, including booking, logistics, payment, reimbursement and reconciliation.
The $2 million in seed funding announced on Wednesday is led by Bungalow Capital and Steve Singh, the Concur co-founder who now is managing director of Madrona and the investment leader of a group of companies including Direct Travel, Troop and Spotnana, of which Singh is now CEO. Bungalow co-founder and partner Matthew Ziskie was among the investors in Pana, which was acquired by Coupa to build out a travel booking offering that the business spend management platform now is in the process of sunsetting. “When he heard that we were back at it again, they were really excited to hop back on,” Tivona said.
With Singh as in investor, Juno is pulling in experience on the “open integration philosophy” it wishes to employ, Tivona said. While Singh is building deep integrations across his investment portfolio, Tivona said Juno will be “Switzerland” in partnering with any TMC as well as working directly with corporate customers.
“There are tons of integrations opportunities there [with Singh’s investments], but it’s not exclusively there,” Tivona said. “We are, at heart, a technology company, and we know a huge piece of the technology that we are building is integrating at the stack at every level. At some TMCs, that might be integrated at the Spotnana level; others at the [global distribution system] level; and other customers, it might be right at the content level.”
Juno has announced Altour as its first integrated TMC partner to provide fulfillment and servicing, in what Tivona said would be the “first of many integrations.” The platform’s “open, integrative approach aligns perfectly with our commitment to deliver innovative travel management through trusted service and technology-driven efficiency,” Altour president Gabe Rizzi said in a statement.
Currently, Juno has “a handful of committed customers, many of whom are in the Fortune 500” that will be going live on the travel portion of Juno when it launches sometime in June, Tivona said. The expense portion, meanwhile, will be going live with customers later this month, he said. Juno’s offerings include a “Juno spend account,” a single account customers can hold to reimburse expenses, pay for hotel and air and issue ride vouchers via a built-in Uber integration. Customers receive a single invoice at the end of the month that includes transaction-level visibility.
Leading up to the launch in a few months, the $2 million investment largely will go toward bulking up Juno’s engineering staff to build out its technology components, Tivona said. It also will bring on some go-to-market team members, but the primary goal is ensuring the quality of the technology, he said.
“These are brand moments for companies,” Tivona said. “It’s an opportunity for companies to show to guests, whether it’s a candidate they have been trying to recruit or a guest speaker, these are the trips that matter most to an organization, and [the guests] are having a high-quality technology experience, which doesn’t just meet the expectations travelers have for corporate tools but the expectations they have in their professional life.”
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