Fintech Startup Mesh Adds Travel Management Platform

Payment and expense management platform Mesh has added a travel management platform to its offerings, targeting clients with complex global travel management needs, the company announced.

Midmarket-focused Mesh launched about four and a half years ago and reports more than 1,000 corporate clients using its integrated payment and expense platform, cofounder and CEO Oded Zehavi said. The newly launched travel module is an "extension" of that platform in response to customers and prospective customers noting program management challenges as their programs become increasingly global in the aftermath of Covid-19, he said.

"Companies that were only present in the U.S. now have [research and development] centers that are cheaper in Eastern Europe or sales teams across [multiple] countries," Zehavi said. "They won't find a single travel management company that is able to service them."

Such companies—generally with between 100 and up to 1,000 or more employees—usually have to work across multiple TMCs or perhaps leave certain regions unmanaged by a TMC, he said. Such programs also generally have 20 to 30 percent leakage from either unmanaged employees or those booking outside of the programs, he added.

Mesh started on the travel side by servicing companies with "orchestrated direct booking," where employees booking direct could controls around booking, budging and payment, but for the larger companies, they needed to maintain relationships with one or multiple TMCs. As such, Mesh developed a platform that "can orchestrate offline and online booking that is fully integrated with our expense management system," Zehavi said.

The platform is designed to work with one or multiple TMCs, not to replace them.

"As opposed to some of the other players coming into the space that are trying to eat the TMCs' lunch, we believe that the TMC is a different business," Zehavi said. "We are a technology vendor, and we believe there is value in the TMCs, and that is why we are trying to modernize the way we are working with the company."

Platform capabilities include compliance controls, in which employees booking get budgeting built into virtual or physical cards used for travel. As they spend on those cards, it automatically goes into the system and determines whether expenses are in budget rather than requiring that to be checked in expense report approval later, according to Zehavi.

The platform also manages employee data, so it does not have to be entered multiple times if they are working across multiple TMCs, he said.

In some cases, the platform will not require integration with TMCs as it can "communicate with agents through multiple channels," but Zehavi said Mesh is in conversations around the world to develop a list of TMC partners. 

The platform can support negotiated rates via its global distribution connections. Mesh currently is live with Sabre, and the other GDSs will be added "soon," Zehavi said.

Pricing for the travel platform will be announced later in the year, with the expectation that it will be more in the form of a platform fee than transaction fees, he said.

Some customers already have begun using the travel platform and are in "the last stages" of rolling it out across their entire company, Zehavi said. Among those are cross-border e-commerce provider Global-e, where the platform has helped in "solving critical bottlenecks in T&E, automatic expense capturing and reporting and streamlining the process for everyone involved," according to Global-e COO Shahar Tamari.

Mesh joins several other fintech providers in developing technology and support targeting travel management, including Brex, which launched a new travel booking service built with Spotnana earlier this year; Coupa, which built a travel booking module from its acquisition of Pana; and Ramp, which developed a travel solution to aid with compliance, expense reporting and data management. Zehavi added that Mesh is "well-funded," with $123 million in investment secured in recent years.