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TravelPerk CEO and co-founder Avi Meir.

TravelPerk

Barcelona-based startup TravelPerk, which helps automate corporate travel and expenses, has raised $104 million in fresh funding from Japanese tech investing giant SoftBank and a flood of other names, to invest in artificial intelligence development and new products.

The company said Tuesday that it raised the cash in a new equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and backed by existing investors Kinnevik and Felix Capital. TravelPerk said it plans to use the money to invest in continued company growth and product expansion.

TravelPerk primarily uses AI technologies like machine learning and neural networks in the back end to help automate a lot of the manual tasks involved in corporate travel — for example, connecting users with the best prices for flights and accommodation.

“Traditionally, if you look at legacy players, like American Express or Expedia, or holiday travel sites, most of the work is done manually by travel agents,” Avi Meir, CEO and co-founder of TravelPerk, told CNBC.

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“This is one of the reasons why you don’t really see huge success at scale with travel, because technology was not used, and technology is how you scale today.”

SoftBank invested $70 million in TravelPerk’s latest round, which the company said was an extension of its “D-1” funding round. The fundraising round shows SoftBank is placing a major bet on a company driving disruption in corporate travel through new technologies, such as AI — which has seen significant buzz since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The latest fundraising round lifts TravelPerk’s valuation to $1.4 billion, a touch above the $1.3 billion at which TravelPerk was assessed during its previous cash raise a year ago.

An “upround,” where a private startup pulls in funds at a higher share price, became a rare event over the last year or two amid sky-high interest rates.

Investing in AI that’s not for ‘show’

Meir poured cold water on some of the buzz around AI, saying that a lot of the experimentation he sees with generative AI tools like ChatGPT seems like more of a “show” than a practical adoption of AI for improving cumbersome problems in travel business. 

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He said TravelPerk is running on a far leaner operating model than incumbents in the legacy travel agency market. Whereas many travel agents operate on low single digits gross margins, Meir says that TravelPerk’s profit margin stood at 60% last year.

“What we did in 2023 is, with the use of AI, basically automated a lot of these kinds of back office manual processes,” Meir told CNBC. “It’s less sexy than having a chat bot, but it’s worth it,” said Meir.

2023 a year of ‘hyper growth’

TravelPerk also intends to use the fresh cash to fuel an acceleration of its gross profit, which grew 90% in full-year 2023 through automation and AI. TravelPerk made annualized revenues of $100 million in 2023, according to its co-founder and CEO Avi Meir. 

TravelPerk had a tough time over the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel of all kinds, not just corporate trips, ground to a halt to stem the spread of the virus. 

The company has since benefited from a resurgence in international travel, as vaccine rollouts enabled public health authorities to lift travel restrictions around the globe.

“Not only are we out of the pandemic, we’re back to hyper growth. 2023 was our best year ever. We grew revenue more than 70% year-over-year, on a pretty large base,” Meir told CNBC.

TravelPerk competes with American Express, BCD Travel, SAP Concur and Navan in the corporate travel management space.

Will IPO when ‘ready’

Post-Covid-19, Meir says, TravelPerk’s growth has been on a tear. He sees the firm reaching profitability on a monthly basis by the end of 2024 and quarterly profitability by the end of 2025.

TravelPerk has continued hiring, rather than laying off staff, as several other travel tech firms have done. The company brought on 50% of its staff in the last two years, according to its CEO.

Meir said that TravelPerk has no immediate plans to go public, as his intention is to build a company that will be around in 100 years. However, an initial public offering is something the company would be “ready” to do if and when it approaches that event, he added.

TravelPerk hired a new chief financial officer, Roy Hefer, last year, who has experience in taking companies public and was part of two tech IPOs in the U.S.

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MicroStrategy copycats are getting out of control as Canadian vape company joins fray

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MicroStrategy copycats are getting out of control as Canadian vape company joins fray

The logos of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether outside a cryptocurrency exchange in Istanbul, Turkey, on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024. 

David Lombeida | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The crypto market’s bullishness may be tipping into speculative frenzy, if the latest MicroStrategy-style copycat is any indication.

On Monday, a little-known Canadian vape company saw its stock surge on plans to enter the crypto treasury game – but this time with Binance Coin (BNB), the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, excluding the dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether (USDT), according to CoinGecko.

Shares of CEA Industries, which trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker VAPE, rocketed more than 800% at one point after the company announced its plans. CEA, along with investment firm 10X Capital and YZi Labs, said it would offer a $500 million private placement to raise proceeds to buy Binance Coin for its corporate treasury. Shares ended the session up nearly 550%, giving the company a market cap of about $48 million.

Given the more crypto-friendly regulatory environment this year, more public companies have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of using debt financing and equity sales to buy bitcoin to hold on their balance sheet to try to increase shareholder returns, pushing bitcoin to new records.

Now, with the S&P 500 trading at new records, the resurgence of meme mania and a pro-crypto White House supporting the crypto industry, investors are looking further out on the risk spectrum of crypto hoping for bigger gains.

In recent months, investors have rotated out of bitcoin and into ether, which led to a burst of companies seeking a similar treasury strategy around ether. SharpLink Gaming, whose board is chaired by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, was one of the first to make the move. Other companies like DeFi Development Corp, renamed from Janover, are making similar moves around Solana.

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Trump Organization says Amazon, Walmart, eBay sellers are hawking knockoff shirts, hats, mugs

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Trump Organization says Amazon, Walmart, eBay sellers are hawking knockoff shirts, hats, mugs

Donald Trump

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The Trump Organization has filed a lawsuit against unnamed online merchants it said are hawking counterfeit merchandise promoting President Donald Trump.

In the suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Florida, the company accused the merchants of selling “inferior imitations” of Trump-branded products on several online marketplaces, including Amazon, Walmart and eBay.

The Trump Organization company, which is owned by Trump, sells a variety of branded merchandise through its website, including a gold T1 smartphone. The Trump Organization alleges the online merchants didn’t license its trademarks and weren’t authorized resellers of genuine merchandise.

“By selling counterfeit products that purport to be genuine and authorized products using the TRUMP trademarks, defendants cause confusion and deception in the marketplace,” the complaint says.

Coffee mugs, hats, t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with “Trump,” “Trump 2028,” and American flags were among the examples of alleged knockoffs listed in the suit.

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The Trump Organization intends to file a motion to seal an exhibit listing the merchants’ identities, according to the complaint.

The company is seeking to prevent the merchants from using Trump trademarks. It also asks a judge to compel Amazon and other online marketplaces to destroy the alleged counterfeit goods and close the merchants’ selling accounts.

Representatives from Amazon, Walmart and eBay didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Amazon, Walmart and eBay all operate thriving online marketplaces that allow third-party businesses to list and sell goods. The companies have all battled issues in the past around the sale of inauthentic or unsafe goods on their platforms.

Amazon sellers looked to cash in on Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year.

Sales of Trump-branded merchandise, including calendars, toilet paper and greeting cards, spiked in January, according to e-commerce marketing company Omnisend, which collected its data from seller software provider JungleScout.

In the lead-up to last year’s election, Amazon sellers made $140 million from Trump-related merchandise and $26 million from products promoting presidential candidate and former Vice President Kamala Harris, Omnisend found.

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Firefly Aerospace sets IPO range that would value rocket maker at $5.5 billion

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Firefly Aerospace sets IPO range that would value rocket maker at .5 billion

Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim sits for an interview at the Firefly Aerospace mission operations center in Leander, Texas, on July 9, 2025.

Sergio Flores | Reuters

Firefly Aerospace will price shares at $35 to $39 each in its upcoming initial public offering, a deal that would value the rocket maker at about $5.5 billion.

The Texas-based space company said in an updated prospectus Monday that it’s planning to sell about 16.2 million shares. The offering could raise up to $631.8 million.

Earlier this month, Firefly filed its plans to go public on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “FLY.”

Its debut comes amid a renewed push in the space race, as billionaire-led companies such as Elon Musk‘s SpaceX funnel more money into space activities and startups try their luck at the public markets.

Space tech firm Voyager went public in June, while reusable rocket developer Innovative Rocket Technologies said it plans to debut through a $400 million special purpose acquisition company merger.

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Firefly’s public market launch also coincides with a revival in IPO activity as debilitating interest rates and an overhang from President Donald Trump‘s tariff plans begin to clear. Design software company Figma is slated to go public this week after raising its range.

Firefly makes rockets, space tugs and lunar landers, including satellite launching rockets known as Alpha. At the end of March, the company reported a sixfold jump in revenue from $8.3 million a year ago to $55.9 million.

The company also reported a net loss of about $60.1 million, up from a loss of $52.8 million a year ago, and said its backlog totaled about $1.1 billion.

Some of Firefly’s major backers include AE Industrial Partners, which led an early investing round in the company. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman invested $50 million in the startup this May, and Firefly says it has collaborated with Lockheed Martin, L3Harris and NASA.

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