Serial entrepreneurs Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom have founded an AI startup to improve hotel room bookings. Called Workgrounds, it promises to automate the manual processes surrounding corporate group travel with its “end-to-end stack.” The company has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate its mission, with participation from Oceans Ventures, Hannah Grey, Volo Ventures, and deftly.vc.
“We were shocked to discover how manual the entire end-to-end process was for sourcing, negotiating, and managing hotel room blocks for corporate groups—a process that is repeated millions of times a year,” Sethi said in a statement. “We wanted to apply AI and other automation to 100x the experience for companies to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel and all through software, a simple user interface, and without the need for hotels to change anything in their well-established processes.”
Sethi and Ullom previously worked together to build the advertising technology startup Adaptly. The company was acquired by Accenture in 2018 after raising $13.2 million in venture funding. Now, the band is back together to address the future of work.
The first version of the Workgrounds platform integrates with human resource management systems, or HRIS, to allow organizations to automatically request proposals from hotel suppliers in a specified market with one click. AI handles everything. No longer will businesses need to submit manual Requests for Proposals to every hotel, wait for responses, scour through each one, and then negotiate to find the right pricing. Workgrounds boasts it will do everything behind-the-scenes, autonomously.
Such a service will be helpful for large enterprises looking to hold conferences in a specific market or for departments interested in retreats or team-building.
While Workgrounds didn’t mention it in its blog post, the company’s vision goes beyond just hotel bookings. It’s addressing all aspects of corporate travel, including flights and guest services. At a glance, it appears Workgrounds is positioning itself to challenge SAP’s Concur and other established players in corporate travel tech.
“We re-imagined the user experience from the perspective of travel planners, the finance teams and their guests,” Sethi remarked. “We created a modern, simple experience, packed with functionality to really enable organizations to manage room blocks for hundreds of teams representing thousands of travelers with ease.”
Workgrounds customers can use the service for free but will be charged depending on their annual spending commitment. If there’s a yearly commitment, the platform does not take a percentage cut of bookings. However, if done in an ad hoc manner, Workgrounds charges 5 percent on all bookings.
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