Munich-based business travel platform, Lanes & Planes, raises $10 million in Series A financing

Munich/Berlin, 25th February 2020 – The business travel and expense solution provider, Lanes & Planes, just announced the completion of their $10 million series A financing. The round is led by Battery Ventures, a global technology investment firm, as the first announced investment in their recently raised $2 billion family of funds, with participation from DN Capital and current investor Connect Ventures.

The investment decision behind partnering with Lanes & Planes was driven by their holistic, end-to-end platform which is better adapted to solving business travel needs than any alternative solution on the market. While Lanes & Planes is a globally available solution, the current target market is Germany which represents approximately a €40 billion annual opportunity. As such, the platform is localized to SMEs’ integration needs while providing a holistic solution for both pre-trip booking and on-trip expense management that both enables good corporate citizenship while providing a consumer-like user experience as well as streamlining back-office processes around post-trip expensing. This investment will be used primarily to continue the strong customer growth and improving the product offering.

“The first couple of years (since founding Lanes & Planes) we focused entirely on product development and will use this investment primarily to expand our customer portfolio in Germany; we chose to partner with Battery and DN as strong partners to help us grow even faster in the longer term.” said Veit Blumschein, CEO and co-founder of Lanes & Planes. In less than a year, the start-up has migrated up both ‘German Mittelstand’ companies, such as edding and Herma, as well as venture backed growth companies, such as Personio and eGym, on to the Lanes & Planes platform.

“We have been screening the market for quite some time now and know how difficult it is to develop software that meets the high expectations of both companies on the one hand and business travelers on the other. Businesspeople today expect a consumer-like experience when booking travel for work. Veit and Daniel have achieved this impressively with Lanes & Planes’ holistic solution and they continue to push the envelope in online, corporate travel”, said Itzik Parnafes, General Partner at Battery Ventures.

Nenad Marovac, Managing Partner at DN Capital adds:
“We quickly realized that this experienced founding team possesses a vast and at the same time unique domain knowledge, with a product-market strategy that matches our own management philosophy: one market at a time. This has been backed up by reference calls by customers using Lanes & Planes who have been strong advocates for the product. And we are very satisfied users for our German operations ourselves ” 

Founded in 2017 by Dr. Veit Blumschein and Daniel Nolte, Lanes & Planes is the first holistic travel management solution that covers all areas of business travel digitally:

• Search and book (all means of travel with the largest inventory in Europe)
• Cancellation, refunds, and rebooking
• Mobile travel companion and in-app ticket wallet
• Expense and receipt management
• Payment and invoicing from one supplier
• Roles, travel policies and approval
• Integration with any ERP system (DATEV, SAP, etc.)
• 24/7 service from trained travel agents

With these services, Lanes & Planes provides medium to large-sized companies (from 10 regular travelers or more), with an intuitive solution for the digital booking, processing and expensing business trips and related receipts. Travel and approval policies can be customized and individually adapted to the traveler or department, while always taking compliance guidelines into account. The Lanes & Planes unique workflow consolidates all the business trip information for the accounting department to easily provide final sign-off as well as complete VAT indication, audit trail archiving and automated sync with the company’s ERP system.

About Lanes & Planes

The Munich-based software company, founded in 2017 by Veit Blumschein and Daniel Nolte, has focused on the development of this innovative software. Lanes & Planes is the first completely digital end-to-end travel management solution that covers all aspects of business travel – from booking to expenses to billing. By using Lanes & Planes SMEs save up to 30% of their direct and indirect travel spend. www.lanes-planes.com

About Battery Ventures

Battery partners with exceptional founders and management teams developing category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, enterprise infrastructure, online marketplaces, healthcare IT and industrial technology. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at all stages, ranging from seed and early to growth and buyout, and invests globally from offices in Boston, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Israel, London and New York. Follow the firm on Twitter @BatteryVentures, visit our website at www.battery.com and find a full list of Battery’s portfolio companies here.

About DN Capital

DN Capital is a leading early stage venture capital firm with investments in marketplaces, software, fintech and consumer internet companies. The firm has operations in London, Berlin and Silicon Valley. DN Capital’s previous funds are top performers and the firm is one of the lead investors in companies such as Tourlane (Germany’s leading tech consumer travel platform), HomeToGo (World’s leading metasearch for vacation rental), Endeca (sold to Oracle), Shazam (sold to Apple), Auto1 (Europe’s largest used-car marketplace) and Purplebricks (IPO in London). www.dncapital.com

Contact

PIABO PR
Maria Samos Sanchez
M: +49 174 169 26 75
Email: [email protected]