Versa co-founder Ted Power
Versa
Founders: Thomas Moore and Ted Power
Headquarters: New York
Funding to Date: $2.5 million
Investor: Y Combinator
Founded to ease the tedious task of travel vendor receipt collection, technology startup Versa is building a network of vendors for whom it can deliver receipt data to authorized platforms. After winning an honorable mention last month from the Innovation Faceoff judges at Business Travel Show America, the startup now is exploring direct relationships with corporate travel programs that could speed up growth of that network.
Versa is "laser-focused" on streamlining the connection between travel vendors and platforms so corporates can get receipt data from their vendors to various platforms like expense management, spend management and duty-of-care providers.
"The benefits are that it saves employees time—no one likes tracking down folios—and it save travel managers the hassles of nagging their employees,” said Versa co-founder Ted Power. “They need this data for duty of care, for policy compliance, as an IRS requirement."
The standardization of receipt data was the key to Versa’s standout technology in the Innovation Faceoff.
"There are solutions out there for hotel receipt capture," event judge and United Talent Agency director of travel services Mira Rosenzweig said of the decision in a recent BTN Next News Desk broadcast. "[It's] the way [Versa] is going about it in terms of having standardized the information process flow rather than [optical character recognition] technology trying to figure out what goes where. [This] potentially eliminates the need of our employees having to recode hotel receipts; [Versa is] also forward-thinking about the other piece that drives us nuts, which is the food and beverage capture."
Connecting the Messy Middle
Versa isn’t Power’s first encounter with the messy middle of receipt data. He co-founded and served as chief product officer for expense management software Abacus, now a part of Emburse. His experience at Emburse inspired Versa, as corporate clients consistently asked for direct data-capture integrations with such vendors as Uber for Business and Amazon, but those integrations each took about a year to build.
"It was like we were starting from scratch every time," Power said.
With Versa, vendors have a single integration to reach all the platforms in Versa's network, and the platforms similarly have a single integration to connect with all vendors. Vendors pass encrypted receipt data directly to the platforms.
Versa's revenue model does not charge vendors to send receipt data, nor do corporate travel buyers pay to transfer data on their behalf to their designated platforms. The fee is paid by the platforms that receive the receipt data.
"They're happy to pay [us to structure the data], because they pay a surprising amount of money to process the unstructured receipts," Power said. "An employee sends in a PDF, and they have to [optical character recognition] it and match it to a corporate card transaction and do all the processing, plus it's a bad user experience."
Unlike some other receipt delivery technology, individual travelers do not need to opt in to have receipt data from suppliers transfer to designated platforms via Versa, Power said. Companies can opt in on behalf of their full traveling population.
Who’s Versed with Versa Now?
Announced travel vendor partners so far include American Airlines and HQ, with participating platforms including Ramp, Emburse, International SOS and Brex.
Versa also has developed a technology plug-in to SAP Concur and delivers receipts into Concur Expense, though Concur is not a paying customer. The expense giant has its own e-receipts connections with select vendors, but Versa developed the connection with the acknowledgement that Concur is by far the market leader for corporate expense technology, Power said.
Since BTS America, Power said the company has been speaking with travel managers to start a new pilot working directly with them, in which Versa will help chase down receipts from vendors that are not currently partners of Versa. Using AI technology, the company can identify the correct vendor email address from which to request a hotel folio, for example. It then can communicate with that contact to get the receipt and get it into the buyer's expense platforms. This could eventually be a software-as-a-service offering from Versa to buyers, though the pilot clients are getting to try out the capabilities for free, he said.
That new model could help grow Versa's original model as well, as Versa can use it to demonstrate to target suppliers its capabilities to deliver the data directly, instead of the vendor fielding thousands of traveler requests for folios. This could help win new vendor partners.
"It's a way to bootstrap that ultimate goal," Power said. "This stuff should be digital on both sides, and it's a great way to bridge to that future."