Repeat Founder Duo Raises $2.6M and Launches Workgrounds to Automate Hotel Room Block Sourcing and Management with AI

NEW YORK, NY -- November 1, 2024 - Nikhil Sethi & Garrett Ullom have raised $2.6M for their next startup, Workgrounds, solving hotel room block management for group bookings. Workgrounds already has clientele including fast growing companies like SeatGeek, RevenueCat, and Yieldmo, as demand for the product soars.

This is the second time the founders are building together, after the successful 2018 acquisition by Accenture of their first startup Adaptly. Founded while the two were in college, Adaptly is an advertising technology platform they eventually grew to 200+ people. Now the duo is at it again, tackling another B2B startup idea in the corporate space, but with similarities: a huge market dominated by a few large platform players, and archaic processes that can be automated on the user-side to simplify the experience of a vast customer base.

“We were shocked to discover how manual the entire end-to-end process was for sourcing, negotiating, and managing hotel room blocks for corporate groups - a process that is repeated millions of times a year,” said Nikhil Sethi, co-founder, Workgrounds. “We wanted to apply AI and other automation to 100x the experience for companies to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel and all through software, a simple user interface, and without the need for hotels to change anything in their well-established processes.”

Workgrounds is building an end-to-end stack to automate the many manual processes that enable corporate group travel. The first version of the Workgrounds platform allows organizations to input their team’s locations or connect via their HRIS systems and in one-click, automatically request proposals using AI from all hotel suppliers in a target market to get the best proposals possible. Given the economies of scale organizations can see by booking as a group, there are upwards of 31% savings being left on the table by not allowing machines and automation to do the hard work. Workgrounds allows teams to cast a wide net and automatically parse those proposals to give planners immediate high quality results without having to run a manual, time-consuming process. In addition the AI agents handle change orders and negotiation to truly deliver the best possible experience.

“We re-imagined the user experience from the perspective of travel planners, the finance teams and their guests. We created a modern, simple experience, packed with functionality to really enable organizations to manage room blocks for hundreds of teams representing thousands of travelers with ease.” said Sethi.

“Working with Workgrounds has been a huge time and money saver for SeatGeek. Our ability to secure room blocks for our teams and partners has gone from a multi-week process to just a matter of days, making the platform a no-brainer for our teams. We can now spend more time focused on creating memorable experiences for our meetings and events and less time managing the core logistics of bringing our teams together,” said Gerard Visser, Director of Workplace Services, SeatGeek.

The shift to more distributed workforces and flexible work is only accelerating adoption and travel spend. While running Adaptly, the team had already observed the massive shift to new ways of flexible working, and Covid greatly accelerated that across the world. Yet the major travel implications these choices had were ripe with opportunity to provide greater degrees of control and automation, especially as organizations with hundreds of team members traveling together are constantly facing new operational and cost saving challenges.

“We built Workgrounds to be the solution we would’ve wanted at Adaptly and then at Accenture,” said Garrett Ullom, co-founder, Workgrounds. “We wanted something that brought all the pieces together in a seamless way. Starting with room blocks, we see a big opportunity to help solve corporate travel scaling issues for teams.”

Today, Workgrounds is launching backed by a pre-seed fundraise of $2.6M from Oceans Ventures, Hannah Grey, Volo Ventures, and deftly.vc.

Learn more at www.workgrounds.com

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