Emburse Again Grows Via Acquisition with Tripbam Deal

Travel and expense platform Emburse has acquired Tripbam, the companies announced today. The move follows a series of acquisitions in the past three years by Emburse, including expense platform Chrome River, analytics provider DVI and mobile travel integrator Roadmap. The terms of the Tripbam deal were not disclosed. 

Tripbam—a two-time winner in the BTN Group’s annual Innovate competition—claims more than 2,000 clients and has documented adoption among large corporates, including BTN Corporate Travel 100 companies like Aon, EY and Microsoft. Founded by corporate travel veteran Steve Reynolds in 2012, Tripbam’s capabilities for hotel re-shopping and price auditing put it on the map for saving companies money beyond realizing negotiated rates, but the company over the past decade has added features to include automated negotiated rate auditing and automated sourcing processes. More recently, the company introduced airfare auditing and re-shopping capabilities.  

 “On the heels of the pandemic, businesses are seeing a strong desire for more employee travel, but a turbulent economy has CFOs and finance leaders looking for ways to keep those costs down without slowing the business, which is exactly what Emburse and Tripbam enable,” said Emburse CEO Eric Friedrichsen in a statement. 

Originally looked upon as combatant disruptor by the hotel community, Tripbam’s hotel re-shopping and rate auditing features have been instrumental in the managed travel industry’s gradual move away from a full reliance on a request-for-proposal-driven annual sourcing season. The company’s more agile approach has also paved an easier path to dynamic pricing, which was pushed for many years by the hotel community, but difficult for corporate clients to implement without an agile auditing strategy in each of their markets. 

Several travel management companies and hotel program solutions providers launched their own versions of rate assurance technologies since Tripbam’s 2012 launch. Yapta, founded in 2007 but which introduced a corporate travel version in 2012, was Tripbam’s nearest competitor. Spend management platform Coupa acquired Yapta in 2020, before also snapping up travel booking platform Pana in 2021. Coupa made both companies proprietary under its umbrella.

That won’t be the case for Emburse in its Tripbam play, Friedrichsen told BTN, given the breadth of companies that use Tripbam but use other spend management platforms. Emburse also has offered Roadmap—now called Emburse Go, and mostly used by large enterprise programs—as a standalone offering. Emburse will take on Tripbam’s total employee roster, all of whom will report to Reynolds. Reynolds will report to Friedrichsen.  

Friedrichsen said letting the product and sales teams operate independently—and investing in them—only opens competitive opportunities for Emburse. “We’ve migrated more and more customers from our core competitors over to Emburse, and I think the more places that we touch those customers, the more opportunity there is to do that,” he said. “We’ve transitioned hundreds of customers from Concur over the last couple of years … and the more opportunities to have relationships with and drive value to those customers [through] Tripbam or Emburse Go, the better it is for us.”

To that end, Reynolds and Friedrichsen spoke about multiple levels of synergistic opportunities, including in the sourcing arena. “There are some really easy opportunities like cross-selling to clients, but there are more complex opportunities like how this new and exciting sourcing platform fits into the Emburse story. It’s definitely on our list to figure out,” said Reynolds.