Roadmap demo’d the prototype of its “corporate travel companion” at the Innovate conference in September 2015. The idea was to simplify the travel experience for business travelers by building traveler-friendly apps customized and branded for each corporate client. “We initially thought that it would be easy to land with small-size, midsize companies that understand that the employee experience is paramount,” said CEO Jeroen van Velzen. “We found out actually that the bigger the company, the bigger the problem, and that’s when we’re needed.”
Roadmap landed Tommy Hilfiger as a client in 2015 and finished the year with another client on the roster, as well. But larger companies took notice, too, and Roadmap signed a large pharmaceutical company, KPMG, Microsoft and another tech company in 2016. The next year brought five more clients. According to a story in BTN sister publication The Beat, seven of those 11 clients are Fortune 500 companies. Van Velzen said 2018 growth has been significant, as well. The company became cash-flow positive in January 2018, and in May, it landed 4 million euros in Series A funding.
Roadmap’s relationship with Microsoft, in particular, is notable. Even before landing the tech company as a client, Roadmap built its platform on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. As Roadmap uses its funding both to chase down the rest of the enterprise market and to delve into predictive tech, it also intends to make its tech open source. Because much of the corporate world similarly is built on Azure, Roadmap will meld easily with corporates’ infrastructure. “It should be really simple for IT departments to basically flip that switch and become the owner of your own data and make that travel and travel profile data more portable and use all of the insights with your own infrastructure and the infrastructure of your travel suppliers,” van Velzen said. “We configure the system using our logic and our intelligence and predictive capabilities, but it’s on their database, it’s on their data lake.”