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.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Read more CNBC tech news
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.