Newly launched guest travel management app Juno has tripled
its funding with a pre-emptive funding round and is now broadening its scope to
tackle other "complex travel" use cases beyond guest travel, the
company announced today.
Developed by
the founders of guest travel management app Pana, Devon Tivona and Sam
Felsenthal, Juno is a platform that can guide guest travelers and their
coordinators through the full travel process, including booking, payment,
reimbursement and reconciliation. It is now live with customers, including a Fortune
500 client, Tivona told BTN.
Juno announced
$2 million in seed funding in April, led by Bungalow Capital, whose
co-founder and partner Matthew Ziskie was among the investors in Pana, and corporate
travel industry entrepreneur and investor Steve Singh, through his investment group Madrona Ventures. The newly announced
pre-emptive funding round—meaning it was raised without Juno actively reaching
out for funding—has added $4 million more to its coffers. Avid Ventures' Tali
Miller led this funding round, with Singh and Matchstick Ventures' Nicole Glaros
participating. Like Ziskie, both
Miller and Glaros were investors in Pana, which was acquired by Coupa to
power a travel booking module that is now scheduled
to sunset at the end of this year.
The new funding will grow Juno's go-to-market and
engineering teams and accelerate product development, particularly its
development of AI agents that handle specific tasks for travelers and
arrangers. That will be the "single largest area of investment" for
Juno, Tivona said.
"They handle specific workflows within our product
which previously required a human being and human reasoning," he said.
"The most obvious example is on travel support. When a traveler encounters
an issue, that's first being triaged by an AI agent that provides assistance,
responds to guest inquiries directly and then escalates to a live agent when
absolutely necessary."
By the end of the year, Juno aims to have more than 30 such
AI-powered workflows designed to manage the needs of complex travel, Tivona
said.
While Juno remains "laser-focused" on the
complexities around guest travel—such as job candidates, consultants and
contractors who typically do not have direct access to a company's travel
program—it is now planning expansion into three other specialized
"high-friction categories" that are difficult to manage with standard
travel management tools, according to Tivona. Those are: life sciences, helping
with travel for clinicians and providers that have special needs; higher
education, where a solid majority of travel are complex trips involving guest
travelers; and sports media and entertainment, which often includes trips with large
groups that are difficult to coordinate.
Juno currently is "co-developing with customers in
those verticals," Tivona said. For example, for life sciences, the company
developed features to handle the complexity of reporting required for traveling
physicians, he said.
In a broader sense, Juno is encouraging companies to move
away from online adoption as the be-all metric for a travel program's success.
A better metric is looking at what coordination time was required for those
trips, which is what Juno seeks to reduce, according to Tivona.
"For complex trips, when you increase online adoption,
all the logistical work that travel agents were doing—the calendar Tetris,
coordinating between multiple shareholders the policy questions—doesn't go
away," he said. "It just gets shifted from a travel desk to an
internal employee."
Juno launched with the focus on being a technology company,
working with travel management companies to handle chat and servicing elements
for clients. In April, Juno announced Altour as the first integrated TMC
partner providing fulfillment and servicing, and Tivona said the company
expects five more announcements by the end of the year.
"This fund-raise will definitely help us accelerate the
number of TMCs we can onboard and the speed we can onboard," Tivona said.