B2B Home-Sharing Platform Roamr Gains 'Foothold' Among Tech Companies

Founders: Stephen Dooley, Jason O'Gorman

Headquarters: Cork, Ireland

Last Funding Round: 2025

Funding Raised to Date: Approximately $3 million

Roamr—a platform which incentivizes employees to stay with friends, family or colleagues during business travel—is gaining traction among tech start-ups, with an eye for wider industry adoption as a solution to rising accommodation costs.

The basic concept behind the Ireland-based Roamr is to divide savings from home stays between the company, the traveler and the host. When a traveler stays with someone they know during a business trip, Roamr takes the cost of what accommodation would have cost in the city and distributes 30 percent of that cost each to the traveler and the host and keeps 10 percent for itself, leaving a savings of 30 percent for the company, co-founder Stephen Dooley said.

With that 10 percent fee per booking, Roamr does not charge companies to set up the platform, and it can include trip approvals and customizable policies. In February, the company introduced a "Roamr for Friends" option, which enables travelers to set up bookings for one-off trips and receive 35 percent of the accommodation costs along with their host, leaving 20 percent savings for the company.

Dooley and Roamr co-founder Jason O'Gorman, who previously worked with hospitality software platform Cloudbeds, originally started out with the idea of a home-sharing network for companies to offer their employees with work-from-anywhere setups, but as they were selling that solution to business, they were told the bigger challenge was the "sheer cost of accommodation for corporate travel," Dooley said.

Even with that pivot, Roamr has been focused on being the "evangelist of bringing the B2B sharing economy into play," according to Dooley. While the two titans of the sharing economy, Airbnb and Uber, have both built significant B2B offerings, that's not where they were focused at the onset, he said.

In the two years since its launch, Roamr has established users in 100 countries, Dooley said. Roamr has had "a very niche focus on technology" as clients, with fast-growing startups a key source of customers. That segment largely has highly distributed workforces, some having been hybrid workplaces from the get-go, and also are very cost-conscious with travel.

One such client, Dublin-based safety technology platform Protex AI, used the platform for a recent offsite meeting in Dublin, where expensive hotel rates presented a challenge to the budget crunch of being a startup. With the platform, "not only did we save significantly, but being able to set rates for employee splits meant we had full control on what we were spending," according to Protex AI co-founder and chief technology officer Ciarán O'Mara.

Roamr also reports as a client a large U.S. public company which it has not named but is in the insurance technology sector, Dooley said. Technology is where Roamr is working to "get a foothold in the market," and beyond that, there are "tons of applications in engineering, construction and financial consulting," he said.

Roamr was among the companies presenting at the recent Business Travel Innovation Faceoff at Business Travel Show Europe in London, and many of the judges' questions during the Faceoff centered around reporting and tax implications of using such a platform. The most popular payment option for Roamr at the moment is for it to bill companies and then distribute the payments to travelers and hosts via fintech company Stripe. Companies also have the option to distribute payments via payroll, which Dooley said is the less popular option due to the additional internal workload, but it would be the option for companies that had tax concerns about the disbursements.

The invoices provided keep companies in compliance for countries with per diem requirements, Dooley added.

Some of Roamr's current clients have been a "partnership play as well," including workforce technology platforms such as Oyster and Deel. The company has not yet explored partnerships with travel management companies, as it is working first to make sure "folks in abundance are staying on Roamr," but Dooley noted a "lot of interest" from the travel management space following BTS and indicated such relationships could be forthcoming.

In the meantime, Roamr recently received a vote of confidence from its investors. Following its €573,000 pre-seed funding round last September, the company planned to raise more money in the fourth quarter of this year, Dooley said. Early this year, however, Roamr announced that it had raised an additional $2.3 million extension to that funding from a group of investors who wanted to pre-empt those funding plans for later this year.

"After three investor updates went out, we caught a bit of fire in terms of traction and the U.S. public company pilot," he said. "It's really cool folks we've brought around. Marc McCabe was the head of Airbnb for Business when Airbnb had 60 employees, and he's an investor. [We have] a lot of exited founders of HR tech companies, like Workvivo, Poppulo, those kind of companies, so we're over the moon with the caliber of folks we've brought around us."

"We had venture capital term sheet offers to extend that round further," he added. "We opted not to take them at this time, but it's likely in our future."