Wetravel, the booking and payment platform for companies

With the B2B travel industry in a tough spot due to the pandemic, travel is back again. Wetravel, the Netherlands-based fintech, has raised $27m in Series B funding to expand into the B2B travel niche, taking care of the entire journey from booking to instant payment to suppliers.

FACTS

• Wetravel offers a solution for collecting and receiving payments, the ability to create your own travel website and 360° management of business travel.

• Wetravel has announced that it has more than 3,000 companies, i.e. 500,000 users of its platform.

• After the covid, the fintech saw a tripling of revenues and a 300% increase in transaction volumes.

• The Series B round was led by Left Lane Capital, Swift Ventures and Base10 alongside investors such as Victor Jacobsson (co-founders of Klarna).

• Eight years after its inception, the fintech had only raised $7 million.

CHALLENGES

• To impose itself on the B2B travel market: in the digital age, travel agencies no longer rule the roost, especially in the B2B travel world. Numerous players such as Booking and Airbnb have managed to establish themselves in this niche. The challenge for Wetravel will be to continue to develop its offer, which consists of two parts:

  • The platform part, which allows you to plan and organise a trip

  • The payment part, which will enable it to offer flexible payment solutions, such as the ability to pay different amounts to different people, staggered payments or even payments spread over several suppliers

• Offering a seamless payment experience: Wetravel focuses on the ease, immediacy and flexibility of payment. The fintech offers a range of payment-related features such as B2B transfer fees, multi-currency management, split payments, etc. According to its co-founder Koeppel, Wetravel intends to position itself as "the Paypal of travel".

• To move up the travel value chain: Wetravel currently relies on applications such as TripAdvisor or Yelp to give recommendations to customers, particularly on places to discover or restaurants. This is an avenue that Wetravel should quickly integrate into its business model.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Wetravel offers a turnkey solution for B2B travel management. Will it be positioned as a "travel-as-a-service" brick or as a "B2B bank-as-a-platform", a genuine B2B marketplace for cash and/or expense management like Penta (which was recently acquired by Qonto), Mooncard or Spendesk.

• The neo-banks have shaken up consumer standards regarding the immediacy of payments, also in the B2B world. This is also supported by the democratisation of the instant transfer (EPI). Companies are increasingly keen on this functionality, notably for better cash management, capital traceability, and better decision-making on cost policies.

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