Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of corporate travel management startup TravelPerk.
TravelPerk
LONDON — TravelPerk, a European corporate travel booking platform, told CNBC on Tuesday it has acquired Chicago-based startup AmTrav to help further its expansion in the U.S.
AmTrav, which operates in the same space as TravelPerk, will continue to operate under the same brand and its entire team will continue with the business.
To help fund the deal and TravelPerk’s broader expansion efforts, the company also raised $135 million in debt financing from private equity firms Blackstone and Blue Owl.
Avi Meir, TravelPerk’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC the deal would allow the company to turbocharge its growth in the United States. He expects the deal to double TravelPerk’s U.S. revenues and make the country its biggest revenue-generating region by 2026.
“Currently, the U.K. is our biggest market,” Meir said in an interview with CNBC, pointing to the firm’s 2021 purchase of British corporate travel startup of Click Travel as the catalyst for its growth in Britain.
Going forward, Meir said, TravelPerk’s takeover of AmTrav will help support a “deep localization strategy” in the U.S., and enable it to offer customers “better rates and inventory options through deeper relationships with suppliers.”
AmTrav has long had data exchange arrangements in place with airline giants American Airlines and Southwest, he added.
TravelPerk now has over 200 employees based in the U.S. and plans to grow its headcount there by a further 35% by the end of 2024. The company employs more than 1,200 people globally. Last year, the firm saw its U.S. revenues grow 65% year-over-year.
The Global Business Travel Association estimated that the US corporate travel sector was worth $329 billion in 2023.
TravelPerk said its U.S. office footprint would expand to include AmTrav’s offices in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed by TravelPerk.
2 years of M&A talks
Jeff Klee, CEO of AmTrav, told CNBC that the company had been in talks with TravelPerk since 2021, adding he was reluctant to sell the firm he founded without the assurance that his firm’s operations would continue unimpacted by the takeover.
“The bar for me to do a deal was pretty high,” Klee told CNBC in an interview. “One of things that both companies have in common is we’re both at our heart software companies — but we both recognize that in the travel industry, there’s still a huge service component from travel.”
“Travellers want to do everything themselves until they don’t — when you get to airport, if there’s a hurricane [or other disruptions], you want someone to get you out of that mess … [so] the service point is very important.”
All AmTrav’s employees will stay on at the company, remaining in their current teams reporting to their same line managers, Klee said.
He joked the only difference would be that he and his co-founder, Craig Fichtelberg, would have a boss for the first time in 35 years: TravelPerk’s CEO.
With the extra $135 million in financing from Blackstone and Blue Owl, the firm’s total funding raised in 2024 now stands at $240 million.
“We are pleased to provide capital that will enable TravelPerk to further execute on the company’s global growth strategy,” Kurt Tenenbaum, managing director at Blue Owl Capital, told CNBC.
“Avi and the rest of the management team have demonstrated a track-record of success, and we are excited to see what they can accomplish over the long-term.”
AmTrav was founded in 1989 by co-founders Klee and Fitchtelberg. The pair met as dorm-mates at the University of Michigan. AmTrav offers localized, digital travel management for small to mid-sized firms.
AI’s impact on corporate travel
TravelPerk said that its business and AmTrav would seek to capitalize on proprietary technology and develop new artificial intelligence capabilities.
The findings were based on a survey of business travel decision makers, travellers, and managers,
“For TravelPerk, AI is about making humans more efficient, rather than replacing them,” Meir told CNBC. “I believe in human connection. This is why we exist as a company.”
“We’ve always focused on a human-first approach to implementing AI at TravelPerk, automating back-end tasks so our people have more time to interact with colleagues, customers and partners.”
TravelPerk’s customers include the likes of Betterment, Adyen, Wise and Red Bull. AmTrav counts more than 1,000 businesses as customers.
TravelPerk’s platform allows users to book business flights, hotels, trains and cars across the US, Canada, the UK Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, India, Singapore, Mexico, Dubai and Israel.
Existing investors in TravelPerk include SoftBank, General Catalyst, Kinnevik, Greyhound Capital, Felix Capital, Target Global, LocalGlobe, Spark Capital and Heartcore.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.