We will be thoughtful and judicious about spending. In my previous company, I didn’t raise any money. He added, “This will give us a long runway for a few years. We’ve got our feet on the ground and we want to execute and do right by our customers.” Raising $115 million in two years could be considered quite a fast raise but Sarosh is quick to remind, “it’s taken me 20 years, not two years, it’s bright and shiny now, but it’s been a lot of pain to get so far. “They have had to work with 10 tech vendors in the past – I should know, that’s what I used to do – now they need only use our platform.” “It’s taken me 20 years, not two” Sarosh said TMCs have been highly receptive to the platform. Spotnana essentially has three go-to-market strategies – as a booking tool or agency for corporates, as a platform for TMCs and as a white label solution for corporations such as tech companies or banks. “It ripped open the bandages, people were frustrated with the way it was and were open to new ideas.” The pandemic also created a more open mindset among players in the industry. “We just focused on product for the first nine months and by September 2021, we started getting good traction from customers.” That turned out to be a blessing in disguise because with no sales to do, the company focused on building. Three months later, Covid happened,” laughed Sarosh. Singh, who is now managing director, Madrona Venture Group, is executive chairman of Spotnana. “It was the biggest break of my life,” said Sarosh. I decided after 20 years, the only way to solve it is to build the infrastructure for ourselves.”Īround that time, he met Steve Singh, considered the guru of corporate travel, having founded Concur and selling it to SAP. He went out asking people, can you build this for us? And when no one could build it, they built it for themselves. “He started selling books first, then their infrastructure failed them. He’s clearly inspired by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. I can’t run two companies at the same time, so one had to go.” That’s when I realised I had to fix this and build the infrastructure myself. But the only way we could scale was using third party tech, so we were dependent on other people. It was a profitable company, employing 120 people in several countries. He felt that to accomplish his vision of building “the AWS of travel”, he needed to do it from scratch, and felt that he had taken WTMC as far as he could. Pre-Spotnana, he owned and ran WTMC, a leading TMC in the US and in March 2018, his agency built proprietary technology and pursued a New Distribution Capability strategy, which saw it become the first in the US to achieve Level 3 NDC certification in 2018. Sarosh should know what the hard problems are, he’s been trying to crack the code for the past 20 years. Putting together the crack team to solve the hard problems Its leadership team comprises the who’s who of corporate travel – top executives who have worked with leading brands in the sector and who have united in Spotnana to solve the hard problems. “Some startups hire the best tech talent but it’s no point if they don’t know how to solve the problem, so you need people on the product side who truly understand the complex problems that have to be solved,” said Sarosh. To do all that, it needs to blend “people with travel domain expertise” with “new world, new tech model of people who are used to solving complex problems”. Only when you can do that can you call yourself a platform.” We are an infrastructure play that will allow different stakeholders to build on it, and make more money than us eventually. Said Sarosh, who left for the US in 1994 from Mumbai on a computer science scholarship at The University of Texas, “We want to modernise the infrastructure for travel, fix the plumbing, that’s a heavy lift. It is looking to hire across a variety of areas including R&D, product, and travel operations. Travel was decimated and now we are facing recession and lots of other uncertainties, changes in political landscape, so we have to move wisely and thoughtfully to hire the right talent to take Spotnana to the next level.”Ĭurrently it has 200 employees in eight global locations and it needs to bring on more engineering and product talent to accomplish its vision for travel, which is to build the “AWS (Amazon Web Services) of travel”. Sarosh Waghmar (right) and co-founder Shikar Agarwal, CTO, Spotnana
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