Independent Iberian asset manager GED Capital has participated with its fund Conexo Ventures in the USD8 million Series A investment round of Troop, a startup that helps with the organisation of in-person meetings for all users.
In addition to GED Capital, other investors participating in the round included Madrona Venture Group (USA), Epic Ventures (USA), All Iron (ES), Plug and Play (USA), Travel Tech 1 – Top Seed Labs (ES) and Founders Factory (UK). The round has also been supported by some of the travel industry’s leading players, including Trivago founder Rolf Schromgens, former Egencia CEO Rob Greyber, former Uber COO Barney Harford, and former SAP Concur CEOs Jim Lucier and Mike Eberhard. The company has been incorporated in the U.S. as part of the financing.
Founded in 2017 by co-CEOs Dennis Vilovic and Leonard Cremer, Troop makes it easy for anyone to organise meetings. Vilovic and Cremer, who operate out of Madrid, Spain, and Johannesburg, South Africa, respectively, launched the company with the goal of providing a data-driven, easy-to-use meeting management tool that would also be effective for planning and booking small or large meetings, in companies of any size and in any geography.
Troop has transformed what has historically been a manual, time-consuming process into a self-service platform that optimises location and time options. The service offered by Troop takes into account, among others, corporate CO2 targets, time, and location of participants’ homes. The company presents quickly and efficiently a menu of location options for in-person group meetings, facilitating all processes. In this way, meeting organisers can use the dashboard to visualise and aggregate data to make quick, informed decisions about group travel and collaborate with colleagues and participants. The funding raised will initially be used to develop the booking and expense functionality so that an end-to-end service can be provided.
Created before the pandemic, Troop’s activity has increased as remote teams meet for in-person sessions, as well as increased business travel.
“We are confident that Troop will continue to experience exponential growth in the next years as its approach is truly innovative and has the potential to drastically change the way corporations interact and plan group meetings,” said Damien Balsan, of GED Capital.
“When we started Troop, we decided to do things differently. Instead of optimizing the way the travel industry sells, we evaluated what the business travel manager needs in a company. They need ease of use, location data, the ability to optimize for a broad set of objectives, including sustainability, the expense and time. And most importantly, the ability to collaborate with peers. As we grow the platform to include deep integrations with booking and expense, Troop will enable a completely new and disruptive approach to corporate travel,” said Troop co-CEO Dennis Vilovic.
In addition to Troop, Conexo Ventures has made investments in firms such as: Vonzu (software for logistics and delivery), Pridatect (Legal-Tech), Feedzai (market leader in the fight against financial crime with artificial intelligence), Kushki (Latin American fintech for online payments), Simple Cloud (cloud-based platform for the management and creation of digital content), Revelock (cybersecurity and anti-fraud through deep learning), BNext (marketplace for financial, insurance and travel-related products), Galgus (enterprise software provider in the area of WiFi) and Atani (global platform for the integral management of cryptocurrencies).
The fund’s investment strategy consists of supporting, through Series A investments, formed entrepreneurial teams that are “exportable” to the United States and South America, and from there to achieve the following rounds of financing (Series B and C) and, finally, the exits.
The Conexo Ventures management team has an active presence in Boston and Silicon Valley. In this sense, the startups participated by Conexo Ventures count on legal, human resources and sales support for their international expansion and have the support of the management team for the syndication of future financing rounds with North American private equity funds.
The Conexo Ventures vehicle, which has already received investment commitments of around EUR44 million, has a target size of EUR50 to EUR60 million, a hard cap of EUR70 million, and expects to invest in around 20 deals, of which around 50 per cent will be follow-on investments.
