Introducing Spotnana

When I first fell in love with travel two decades ago, I learned that bad service and high prices are a byproduct by a dated technology stack that hurts travelers and disconnects travel providers from travel agencies.

Here is a map of the industry I drew in 2004 showing the web of companies that cause travel’s distribution and service problems.

It’s been a long time since I drew this in my notebook, but the global travel industry is limited by legacy technology built fifty years ago during the era of mainframe computing. To get around limitations baked into the system, a variety of solutions provide workarounds that cause another set of problems to arise.

Spotnana started work in 2020 with a vision of how travel will look in 2030.

What can we build to ensure every traveler has the perfect experience, with great service and the most choice at the lowest possible price?

Our mission: rebuilding the infrastructure of travel to bring freedom and trust back to the industry.

Why we started Spotnana

I started Spotnana along with my co-founder Shikhar Agarwal to rebuild the infrastructure of travel and improve the experience of everyone involved: travel agencies, travel providers, and, most importantly, travelers themselves. We’ve built a world-class team of experienced travel operators and technologists to make this happen.

Our mission is to bring trust and transparency back to travel by creating a perfect experience for travelers from the time they book a trip to when they arrive back home.

The only way to fix the industry is to build travel’s first open innovation platform, since a better ecosystem can only be created in partnership with leaders across the industry.

We’ve launched Spotnana with a truly global travel management solution that puts all of a company’s offices on one unified global platform with granular policy and safety features. Our customer experience team is ready to help 24×7 and all our flights and hotels are presented without bias from a variety of global sources.

The Spotnana platform has a unified UI/UX for travelers, administrators, and travel agents. This removes the disconnect that happens between booking, embarking on a trip, and being serviced while on the road.

We’ve also removed onerous and confusing service fees completely. Our consumption-based model ensures companies only pay per trip, which is important in the Covid-19 era. We’ve also committed to refusing all GDS incentives and overrides; the traveler comes first.

This is only the beginning, though. We’ve built Spotnana on API-friendly microservices and are making our tech stack available to other travel companies for them to use and build on.

Our mission to change travel

I am extremely pleased to have found a set of believers, advisors, investors who share our vision of a travel industry that truly works for travelers.

These include our chairman of the board Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona Venture Group and former co-founder and CEO of Concur. We are delighted to have ICONIQ’s Greg Stanger, the former CFO of Expedia, on the board as well. Bhaskar Ghosh (BG), Partner and CTO at 8VC, made a bet on me and Shikhar in the early days by leading our seed round and we want to gratefully acknowledge him as well.

8VC, Mubadala Capital, Decibel, Shah Capital, and Global Founders Capital have invested and have been huge contributors to our progress so far.

Likewise, our investors and advisors include numerous product and technology luminaries:

Jeetu Patel — EVP, Cisco

Gokul Rajaram — Doordash

Scott Belsky — Chief Product Officer, Adobe

Vinod Marur — SVP Engineering, Databricks

Akshay Bhargava — Chief Product Officer, 1Password

Arjun Chopra — Partner, Floodgate

Josh Spear — Partner, Ironspark

Mohit Aron — Founder, Cohesity

Priyendra Deshwal — Co-Founder, ThoughtSpot and Netspring

Stay tuned for much more as we work to build a better future for travelers.