Montréal-based Planned has secured $35 million CAD in Series B financing to fuel its product development and international expansion plans.
The corporate events and travel company’s co-founder, Marc-Antoine Bonin, envisions a future where companies that want to coordinate an event as big as Google’s I/O developer conference or as small as a Christmas party will be able to do so with artificial intelligence (AI).
In 2017, he co-founded his company, previously called Entr, that built an online marketplace and platform to help enterprises’ events and procurement departments plan company meetings, track vendors, book travel, and monitor spending all in one online tool while adhering to company policies.
“Planned’s innovative approach makes it a standout in an industry that is almost tragically old school.”
Frederic Lalonde, Hopper CEO
“Events, for most enterprises, [are] the second biggest expense after payroll,” Bonin told BetaKit in an interview. Currently, external travel management companies make up a sizable chunk of the $1.4-trillion events and travel market, he said, but most of that work is “very manual.”
“With AI, we believe that we’ll be able to automate most of what travel management companies do,” he said.
Frederic Lalonde, founder and CEO of Montréal travel tech giant Hopper, is a believer in Planned and has joined the company’s board of directors as part of this round.
“Planned’s innovative approach makes it a standout in an industry that is almost tragically old school,” Lalonde said in a statement. “I look forward to contributing to its continued success and expansion.”
The all-equity round was led by Columbus, Ohio’s Drive Capital and saw participation from fellow existing investor, New-York-based Outsiders Fund. An undisclosed institutional investor and fourth financier also participated, but Planned declined to share their identities with BetaKit.
This latest capital brings Planned’s total funding to date to $65 million. Since the last round, Planned grew its revenue by a multiple of 30 and its annual recurring revenue is “multiple millions,” Bonin claimed.
Inovia Capital, which previously invested in the startup at the seed stage, sold its stake as part of Planned’s $24.5-million CAD Series A round in 2022.
The company launched AI capabilities in June last year and Bonin plans to put the funding toward product development, particularly improving the platform’s ability to book travel. The platform has an AI agent and users can ask it for recommendations on things like which hotel is the most inexpensive, has wheelchair access, and a varied menu for dietary considerations. Then, the AI agent can put all those suggestions into a comparison table.
RELATED: Event platform Planned raises $4.7 million as it hopes for return to in-person events
Bonin said Lalonde’s experience in the travel industry will help the company as it looks to scale. In addition to product development, the startup plans to hire 20 positions in Montréal and 12 positions internationally. It’s already in the United States and this year, Planned opened an office in Amsterdam to target the European market and intends to open one in Singapore to target the Asia-Pacific region.
Currently, Planned’s platform can coordinate events that have up to 25,000 attendees, Bonin said, and the company counts large firms in the fashion and beauty industry and the tech industry, such as Google and Amazon, as customers.
And though the startup didn’t plan Google’s developer conference this year, Bonin said the new funding will allow it to help orchestrate events like this in the future.
“With large events, you need a bit more humans in the loop, like, you need to have someone that they can call,” said Bonin. “But with AI, we can automate a lot of the work and provide an amazing experience to the customer.”
Feature image courtesy Planned.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify that Inovia Capital sold its stake as part of Planned’s Series A raise, and that, Outsiders Fund, not Outsider Capital, invested in the round.
