TripActions — not ‘just another’ unicorn — Part II

A decacorn in the making

At the end of 2018, we published a prediction about one of our portfolio companies TripActions, the world’s fastest growing business travel platform. TripActions’ mission is to enable face-to-face meetings that help drive people, ideas and businesses forward. At the time of our original post, TripActions had just been inducted in the Global Unicorn Club, meaning it had reached a valuation of more than USD $1 billion. Our original prediction read as follows:

We strongly believe that TripActions has all the ingredients required to become a decacorn (a valuation of more than $10 billion) within the next five years.

As it turns out, we were wrong. Our amended prediction is now this:

We strongly believe that TripActions has all the ingredients required to become a decacorn (a valuation of more than $10 billion) within the next two years.

While the odds of becoming a unicorn are extremely rare (about 1% per CB Insights’ research from 2018), the probability of becoming a decacorn is less than 0.05%. CB Insights also keeps a running list of the Global Unicorn Club and in Q3 2018, this list showed there were 285 unicorns around the world with a cumulative value of $894 billion. Since then, more than 60 companies joined the Global Unicorn Club, bringing the total to 346 global unicorns with a cumulative value of $1.1 trillion.

To break it down further, 243 companies (67% of total) range between a $1 billion to $2 billion valuation and account for roughly 29% of the cumulative value of the list. 85 companies (24% of total) are valued between $2 billion and $10 billion and account for roughly 32% of cumulative value. A mere 18 of those companies (5% of total companies) are decacorns and account for roughly 43% of the cumulative value of the list.

Similar to WeWork, AirBnB, and Stripe, who are on the decacorn list, TripActions also possesses an extremely rare combination of game-changing technology, a mission-driven culture, best-in-class leadership, and is disrupting a huge total addressable market. We believe TripActions is not ‘just’ another unicorn and that they will join the ranks of those 18 companies on the decacorn list in the next two years. To further elaborate:

• TripActions’ product is already generations ahead of their legacy competitors. Their mobile-first solution combines convenience, reporting and analytics, and behavioral science-backed design that saves enterprise customers an average of 30% on their hotel spend.
• TripActions has improved the speed and ease of booking and managing corporate travel. We can attest, not only as investors but as customers, to the quality of the customer service of TripActions’ mobile app as well as the ease of the booking process (it only takes us six minutes to book a business trip).
• Furthermore, when we introduce new clients to TripActions, they are quickly on-boarded by the exceptional enterprise sales team. New companies see a traveler adoption rate of 90%.
• TripActions has an exceptional and diverse leadership team with deep tech, travel and software expertise, made up of over 60% women.
• The total addressable market is absolutely massive and worth more than $1.5 trillion.

As investors, our team at Group 11 can only describe our journey so far with TripActions as akin to an astronaut hopping on a rocket ship to the moon. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s ex-CEO once said, “When you are offered a seat on a rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” Today, TripActions announced a massive new round of $250 million in Series D funding, bringing its total funding to more than $480 million. Having backed TripActions since its inception, Group 11 is truly excited to continue supporting the company alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Zeev Ventures.

Congratulations to TripActions’ co-founders Ariel Cohen, Ilan Twig, and the entire 700+ strong TripActions team!