Perk: From Travel Ban to Travel Boom

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) Co-Founder and CEO Avi Meir has spent the last decade doing something few travel companies have been successful in doing: making travel work for the people who rely on it.

In 2014, Meir sold Hotel Ninjas, a company he co-founded, to Booking.com. From the travel industry leader, he spotted the gulf that existed for most business travellers when they went on holiday. For consumers, the modern way to book any trip was using a mobile app, directly from airlines and hotel chains—a far easier user experience. By contrast, most companies managed business costs by relying on clunky travel management systems that made sense to accountants but not employees.

Perk is the company he built to close that gap. Not by digitising the old model, but by replacing it entirely. Today Perk is an AI-native platform for travel, spend and events, architected from the ground up with AI at its core, not bolted on top. It serves over 12,000 companies worldwide and generates more than $300 million in ARR.

In November 2025, Perk launched its new platform and rebranded from TravelPerk to Perk, marking a deliberate expansion beyond travel into the full picture of how companies spend and how teams come together. At the same launch, Perk announced dual headquarters in Boston and London, cementing its position as a genuinely global business with real presence on both sides of the Atlantic.

LocalGlobe backed Perk in 2015 through their seed round, and we’ve followed-on at almost every stage through Latitude and Solar. In that decade, the company has grown tremendously.

In this Voices that Matter interview, part of the Red Book series, Avi talks about the growth journey, how Phoenix Court helped him weather the pandemic, and what building an AI-native global company actually means in practice.

Q: Business travel was a long established category when you started. What was the opportunity you saw when you founded Perk back in 2015?

A: Most travellers, when they go on holiday, have the modern way of booking their trip, they will use an app. They’ll book a flight directly, book the hotel with Booking.com and generally have a good experience.

But then the business travellers, who are the same people by the way, are told to speak with an agent. The user experience was very old world in business travel, and we thought let’s just bring technology to business travel. Let’s provide a consumer-grade experience, which is the best experience. Maybe in other verticals, enterprise-grade is higher quality, but in travel, it used to be the other way around. That founding instinct, that business travel deserved better technology, is still what drives us. The difference now is that AI has changed what better actually means. We're not just building a better booking experience. We're building a platform that eliminates the work that surrounds travel and spend management entirely.

Q: What specific innovations did you introduce?

A: We went multi-source. The old way of doing travel was that the travel agent works directly on something called the GDS, or Global Distribution System, which is this archaic system still running on mainframes built in the 60s and 70s by the airlines. It has a lot of limitations. It doesn’t have all the airlines. It doesn’t have the best prices. It doesn’t allow them to necessarily note your loyalty program.

We innovated in inventory early on, and made all of the inventory on the open internet available to business travellers. We were the first ones to join the dots, and we are still positioned in that category, allowing business travellers to book Airbnb and Booking.com content, because these are partners of ours, as well as other content. That’s something that was considered impossible. So we have a unified way to see everything and choose the best offer for you.

That was the first innovation we did. The second wave is what we're building now. We rebranded from TravelPerk to Perk because the opportunity expanded, from travel into the full picture of how companies spend and how teams come together. Travel, spend, events, the three things that move a business forward, in one platform. And the engine running through all of it is AI. Not AI as a feature layer sitting on top of what we built. AI embedded into the fabric of the platform, running at the point of booking, the point of approval, the point of submission. Preventing problems before they happen rather than reporting on them after the fact. Our AI is already running 200,000 fraud checks per week, achieving a 90% touchless expense rate, and making 10,000 autonomous calls to hotels every week on behalf of our customers.

Q: You mentioned you sold your first company, Hotel Ninjas, to Booking.com which has become the global travel leader from its base in Amsterdam. Did that play into your decision to build Perk as a global company?

A: In many other industries, local champions proliferate early and then consolidate around one or two global players. Travel is different, and Booking.com taught me why. The lesson I took from them is that winning globally means building locally.

When we launched Perk in November 2025, we announced dual headquarters in Boston and London. That was not a symbolic decision. It reflects what we have always believed, that to win in business travel and spend globally, you have to be genuinely global. Not a European company with a US office. Not a US company trying to retrofit for Europe. A global company, built that way from the start, with real presence and real commitment on both sides of the Atlantic.

Because travel, and especially business travel, is very local. Most business travel is not international, however many Londoners might disagree. So if you look at Germany, for example, according to the Business Travel Association of Germany, close to 90% of all business travel is domestic. So what is business travel then? It’s a subcontractor living in a suburb outside Munich travelling by train to Stuttgart. Business travel is a solar panel installer doing a three-week project, staying in an Airbnb while installing solar panels on top of a big factory a hundred miles from home. This is business travel more than you and I might think of it as travelling to a conference in another country. It’s very local, which means that the products need to be really local. You need to understand localisation. It is language specific, but it’s also about local inventory. Booking a train on Deutsche Bahn in Germany is very different from booking a train in the UK, often excruciatingly so.

We do flights, accommodation, rail travel and cars, both as verticals and on a global basis. That means that our product needs to be very local, everywhere. In Germany, we have a German product. In the UK, we have a UK product. In the US, a US product. The commercial agreements, the inventory pipes, the product experience are all different, and all local.

Do you know what Japanese people need to see as the first image when they choose a hotel? It’s the toilets. We investigated. We looked at conversion data. Travellers know what they're looking for, and it is our job to know that before they even search. This is what I mean by localisation. We learned the playbook at Booking.com and adopted it for business travel.

And this global, local approach is core to how we are structured now. Boston and London as our headquarters. Deep local product knowledge in every market we operate in. That is why we are winning globally in SMB, because we build country by country while thinking globally from the centre.

Q: When Phoenix Court topped Dealroom’s Power Law investor, you commented on LinkedIn that “I rank them as the best humans in VC. Full stop.” What inspired you to say that?

A: We’ve worked together for many years, and when somebody shows me that they are there for me, this loyalty is very important to me personally.

When I am down on the ground, it is very easy to kick me. It’s easy to be a friend when everything is going well. But when you show up for me when I really need you, then you have my personal loyalty forever, right? That’s how I work. That’s how I function as a person.

Covid was a watershed moment, when some investors showed their true colours and stopped picking up my calls, or came up with a really good excuse for why they could not support and invest in us.

Back in February 2020, before anything was clear about where the epidemic was headed and it was complete chaos, it became illegal to use my product, unless you were classified as an essential employee. I was thinking maybe we would have to pivot.

But then this email arrived from Phoenix Court saying, “Hey, I have $3 million to wire you. Tell me where to send it.” It was an unsolicited cheque, coming at the absolute best moment. This created momentum in my cap table to do another round and eventually climb out of the crisis as a much stronger company. Phoenix Court was the catalyst for this.

Q: It must have been a scary moment for you.

A: You know, I’m 22 years old. I just look old because of all the stress! (Laughs)

Q: The business travel market is now estimated to be $1.5 trillion, which is up 6% from 2019. Where is Perk now, relative to before the pandemic?

A: Our top-line revenue going into the pandemic was growing at 3x annually. We were hitting new records every day. We hit $20 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), right before the pandemic hit. We are now crossing $300 million.

Q: That’s phenomenal. What happened?

A: We had some tough years in between during the pandemic, but we just managed the whole company according to certain priorities. The first was to survive, so we have to make it alive, which means cash. We had to cut costs as much as we could. Money was coming in from investments and if customers started travelling again, great, but we needed to make sure we had cash. We had a very strong culture and values. But I would be a hypocrite if I fired everybody, like some of our competitors did. I mean everybody. We are the only company in travel that didn’t do layoffs, to my knowledge.

Q: You didn’t lay off anyone. Why was that important to you?

A: We kept the jobs as long as we could, and I risked the company for that. If you claim to have certain values but you don’t stick to them when it’s costing you something, then these are not real values. It’s just virtue signalling, something to say at a party to feel good about yourself.

So the first priority was to survive. The second priority was to emerge stronger. It’s probably a bad metaphor but I had to think like a bear with winter coming. Some bears hibernate, and they lose all their fat and muscle and come out completely starving. If they don’t eat quickly, they die.

And I said, you know what? We’ll stay out of the cave. We may lose all the fat, but we will not lose the bone and the muscle. In our case, we used the time to train people on sales, train people on the industry travel inventory distribution system.

We also had so much free time to develop the product because nobody was travelling. So we just invested in the technology, right? We actually hired more engineers during the pandemic. We grew the team during the pandemic by hiring engineers. We emerged stronger by investing in what we could, trimming fat but not cutting muscle. The decisions we made during that period, doubling down on product and engineering when everyone else was pulling back, are directly responsible for the AI capability we have today. We weren't building for the moment. We were building for what travel, spend and events management would need to become.

The third priority was, bluntly, to turn lemons into lemonade. Whatever opportunities were created by the crisis, we looked into and for us that meant acquisitions. We bought a couple of competitors – one from the UK and one from the US, which proved very, very good and we cut them at the best moment, at very favourable prices. Crisis creates opportunities.

Q: In January 2025, you raised a $200 million Series E round. What are you using that capital for?

A: Mostly it’s for organic growth, product development, hiring salespeople, hiring engineers. We are growing fast, at around 50% at the moment. A significant part of that investment is going into AI, our in-house AI lab, our agentic capabilities, and the builds that will define what our category looks like in five years. We're not investing in AI because it's the narrative of the moment. We're investing because it's the only way to genuinely solve the problem we set out to solve, removing the friction that stops people doing the work that actually matters. So we keep doing what we are doing. To sustain this kind of growth off this kind of base, you just have to keep investing.

Q: The IPO window seems like it’s reopened for tech companies. How does this play into your thinking about a potential exit?

A: The way I see an IPO is that it is just a financial milestone. I don’t want to diminish the importance, but it’s just a step along the path. My mom would be happy, and she probably would cut the newspaper article out and put it on the wall. But it’s not a really important milestone, in my view. I’m more excited about customer wins, about expanding the new markets, adding new features, et cetera.

We don’t have an immediate plan to IPO. We don’t need the cash.

If, however, at some point we need to provide liquidity to our shareholders, employees, and investors, we might look into it. We see a lot of interest for secondary investments. We have more potential buyers than sellers.

So liquidity is not an issue. We will see when the time might be right. But for now it’s not something that I see as a high priority.

Q: What is your ultimate goal for Perk?

A: We have a real mission, but I also have a secret one.

My secret mission is to keep building a company and to run as far as I can, and then to hand it over to somebody else, ideally, in like 56 years.

The real mission is to become the platform that powers real work for companies everywhere. Not just booking travel. Not just managing expenses. Not just organising events. Removing the shadow work, the invisible non-core tasks that drain people of time and energy, so that every employee can focus on the work that actually matters. AI is how we get that time back.

I hope this is my last job and I never want to retire. Along the way, I want to create the best company for families, and I really want to offer an environment where employees can thrive professionally, but also have a life outside of work and get married and have children. Technology and being a tech company is great because it gives you a lot of buffer to do stuff for families that you couldn’t do if you were, I don’t know, operating a mine or something.

At the end of it all, I believe in God and I believe I will be judged on how I treated people. Building a company where people can thrive professionally and still have a life outside of work, that is the higher purpose behind everything I do.

Q: What are you going to do at Perk that’s going to allow you to deliver on your secret mission?

A: We have to keep succeeding. We are not an NGO. We don’t rely on donations. So we have to keep succeeding. We have to create profit. We have to keep growing. The opportunity here is relative to our size, the opportunity is infinite. Obviously, it’s not infinite by definition, but relative to our size, it feels infinite. Business travel has been estimated to be a $1.5 trillion market. It has come back after the pandemic. But we only process something like $6 billion in gross merchandise volume. So 6 out of 1,500 is not a lot in a market that is growing.