Repeat founders Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom have raised $2.6 million for Workgrounds, a startup solving hotel room block management for group bookings. Workgrounds already has clientele from fast-growing companies, including SeatGeek, RevenueCat, and Yieldmo, as demand for the product soars. Investors in this pre-seed funding round include Oceans Ventures, Hannah Grey, Volo Ventures, and deftly.vc.
Sethi and Ullom previously founded ad-tech company Adaptly in 2010 while college students at Northwestern University. Adaptly, a platform that helps marketers buy targeted ads across online platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, scaled to over 200 employees and was ultimately acquired by Accenture in 2018. This time, the duo are tackling another B2B startup idea in the corporate space with similarities: a huge market dominated by a few large platform players and archaic processes that can be automated on the user-side to simplify the experience of a vast customer base.
“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,” said Nikhil Sethi, co-founder of Workgrounds. “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.”
Workgrounds is building an end-to-end stack to automate the many manual processes that enable corporate group travel. The first version of the Workgrounds platform allows organizations to input their team’s locations or connect via their HRIS systems and in one-click, automatically request proposals using AI from all hotel suppliers in a target market to get the best proposals possible. Given the economies of scale organizations can see by booking as a group, there are upwards of 31% savings being left on the table by not allowing machines and automation to do the hard work. Workgrounds allows teams to cast a wide net and automatically parse those proposals to give planners immediate high-quality results without having to run a manual, time-consuming process. In addition, the AI agents handle change orders and negotiation to truly deliver the best possible experience.
“We re-imagined the user experience from the perspective of travel planners, the finance teams and their guests. 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,” added Sethi.
“Working with Workgrounds has been a huge time and money saver for SeatGeek. Our ability to secure room blocks for our teams and partners has gone from a multi-week process to just a matter of days, making the platform a no-brainer for our teams. We can now spend more time focused on creating memorable experiences for our meetings and events and less time managing the core logistics of bringing our teams together,” said Gerard Visser, Director of Workplace Services, SeatGeek.
Workgrounds is benefiting from the secular trend towards a more distributed workforce and flexible work, accelerating adoption and travel spend. While running Adaptly, the team observed the large shift to new ways of flexible working. Further accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, this global shift created major operational and cost-related implications for corporate travel and opened an opportunity for AI-enabled software to solve these challenges by providing greater degrees of control and through automation.
“We built Workgrounds to be the solution we would have wanted at Adaptly and then at Accenture,” said Garrett Ullom, co-founder of Workgrounds. “We wanted something that brought all the pieces together in a seamless way. Starting with room blocks, we see a big opportunity to help solve corporate travel scaling issues for teams.”
About Workgrounds
Workgrounds is an end-to-end platform that automates the process to source, book, and manage hotel room blocks at scale for enterprises. Our AI agents eliminate the manual processes of corporate group travel and enable organizations to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel, saving them both time and money. To learn more, visit www.workgrounds.com.
Workgrounds is an end-to-end platform that automates the process to source, book, and manage hotel room blocks at scale for enterprises. Our AI agents eliminate the manual processes of corporate group travel and enable organizations to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel, saving them both time and money. To learn more, visit www.workgrounds.com.
