BoomPop raises $25M to automate corporate group travel with AI agents — CEO says it's the second biggest expense after payroll

acquired by Bending Spoons, was founded by Jeremy Aair, who runs Circle now. Yeah. 2004. Uh, very fun. Well, our next guest is Healey from Boom Pop. Healey, how you doing? Welcome to the TVP Ultra.

Hey, how's it going?

Haven't seen you in a while. What's up, man?

Been a while. How you doing, man? Good to see you.

Good to see you. Uh, introduce yourself for those who don't already know.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, my name's Healey Cipher. I'm the CEO co-founder of Boom Pop. Yeah.

And um we are actually you know what's so funny? Hold on one second here. I'm gonna close this.

Yeah, no worries.

Okay, I got you. Um yeah, we're an AI powered group travel company. I've been running and selling companies my whole career. I'm from Nebraska, which is a small state in the center of the country you probably haven't been to. And the plot twist in Saudi Arabia.

Wait, what? You grew up in Saudi Arabia? I didn't remember that. That's crazy.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Riad for 16 years.

16 years. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Anyway, let's go back to the business.

What is somebody if if if what what is the must do thing in Saudi Arabia for you?

Beast world wasn't there when you were there. [laughter] How did you survive?

Beast land.

The the new hotness in Saudi. There's this place called I think so Alawaba. It's like um Petra in Jordan but in northern Saudi. And they actually I think they're building an Aman there right now. So there's like there's some stuff going down here property. Uh, so give us the latest. Give us the news. Give us the fundraising news.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, man. So, we raised a $25 million round. Uh, pulled in some Oh,

yes. Thank you.

Appreciate that. Appreciate that.

Thank you, Jordy.

Uh, pulled in some debt and equity and yeah, it's all about growth. You know, I think

travel has produced some really good returns for venture. You know, you think about Airbnb, Expedia, booking, it's crushed. People don't think about it. Travel's like 10% of global GDP. It's 11.7 trillion.

Wow.

And often when you think of travel, especially in the corporate setting, you got to think of like whatever your EA is booking you a flight.

Yeah.

Um turns out 60% of corporate travel is stuff involving groups. It's like an off-site or an SKO. And and especially in today's day and age, we're finding the demand for group travel is the most it's ever been. Some fun facts. one, most people are exceedingly less trustful of Zoom meetups. They want to meet people people in person. Uh most AI companies now are hiring event teams. Like it's one of the first hires because it turns out for scaled AR businesses, um events are like one of the number one demand channels. And so as we looked at group travel, we were kind of like, wait, wait, wait. It's this massive part of travel and it's so inacronistic. Like if you want to if you want to, for example, book over 10 hotel rooms, you literally can't do that online. Did you know that?

Yeah, it's crazy. We ran into this. Yeah, we ran into this a fair amount of times just with the small team traveling like uh it it happens. I don't know if you saw that block party that they had the where it like showed up in their earnings cuz they spent so much they spent like 68 million or something on [laughter] the craziest stories

on one trip.

No, this is this is real. Like I was at this conference and the then president of Brex walked over to me and he was like, "Hey, are you Helia Boom Pop?" And I was like,

"Yeah, but who cares, man? like you're the president of Brex. Like I'm nobody. He goes, "No, no, guess what the second biggest expense category is for all of our companies after payroll."

And I was like, "No way." He goes, "It's group travel and events, man."

Like, "Holy shit." So, it's on the rise. It's crazy.

Yeah. So, uh, talk through the actual product experience. Uh, how do you And then, and then how do you actually make money? Are you just, uh, taking a fee on top of whatever is booked? Is that the secret?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so the product is pretty rad. it to success

or or I mean it could [laughter] be like seed based

turns out you should buy low then sell high.

Yes. This is good. This is good. I [laughter] like

uh yeah he heard it here folks. Uh yeah so it's it's simple. You talk to our AI agent. You give it a simple prompt. You're like yo I want to do an offsite within whatever a 2-hour drive of LA uh a budget of this 50 people with some cool fun outdoor activities. What should I do? And it looks at millions of data points. looks at weather, seasonality, a hotel pricing, what you've done, what your guests like and then it puts together a couple of really good options like here's Joshua Tree by the minute of what you do. Here's Pioneer Town you haven't heard of. You should go there. Here's Monteceto, go there. And then if you like it, you just say, "Hey, cool. Do it." The AI will then go out, it'll reach to the vendors, it'll negotiate for them, look at the contract, it'll book them for you. It makes an agenda. It even makes your website in a couple seconds. Keeps it live. And when people RSVP, my favorite thing is everyone gets a text message. All your guests get a text and it's from the AI on the phone. And so over text, it's like, "Yo, how can I help?" And you can say, "Hey, like how do I get to the hotel?" It's like, "Take an Uber, you idiot." Like, "Oh, okay." Or like, "Who else is landing right now?" And oh, well, Jordy and Kugan land around this time. Do you want to share an Uber? And you're like, "Oh, that's awesome." So it's it's like this corner of travel which is so big and it's all these random joint solutions like point solutions and we decided let's just put it all into one place where it's super easy. Our ultimate vision is very simply we want to be the default way the world gets together. I'm sure you guys have seen all the you know I saw Chesky on on EVPN. I think it was last week. Like we got a problem guys. We have a real problem. I mean people are lonely. They're not getting together. I don't know if you saw this study back in the 70s. It was eight out of 10 high school seniors said they would party twice a week. Now it's one in 10. Like

that's a problem.

Party. party. [laughter]

Red alert. Red alert. Red alert.

We don't even know how to party in this country anymore. [laughter]

That's right. That's right. That's right. So, that's how it works. Um,

yeah.

And then, yeah, it's it's it's it's a simple SAS model. You pay very low amount and then we make money from the hotels.

Okay. Cool. Cool.

Yeah. All the money in travel, it turns out, is in hotels.

It's not in flights.

Yeah, that makes sense. Um, are you uh so so we were thinking about taking the team to F1 and I ran something through Chat GPT. Hey, build a whole thing. Uh, couldn't get to a place where we could just build it. Didn't really didn't really hit the goal. But are you worried about some of the agent commerce being a headwind or can you turn AI and chat GPT into like a tailwind and actually like more of a top of funnel for you?

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. No question. It'll be it'll be a tailwind and top of funnel. I think about this a lot like AI applications are under a lot of scrutiny. Like aren't you screwed? Like it's kind of like the 1990s. Everyone's like, "Why would you build an app? Microsoft is going to roll you." And that's what everyone says about AI apps. It turns out it's not going to do everything. Yeah.

And so there's kind of I think there's three things you can do and in general as an AI app to like protect yourself. One is you have some sort of proprietary data. We've got that. We spent two years building out a database and it's got all the stuff you can't find in Chat GPT like private dining rooms, which how would you do that today? You got to Google it. You got to call meeting spaces. We have a bunch of stuff you wouldn't get. The second thing I think you got to have is a learning network that they don't have access to. So every event that happens in our platform, it makes the next event faster and easier and the next event faster and easier. So if you talk to a hotel and they come back and try to negotiate something, we know exactly what they did at the last 100 events. Ah, we're not going to send that to them. We make it easier.

Sure.

And the third thing which tends to be underindexed is just building a purpose-built application for a specific use case. It turns out like

looking at black and white [laughter] Honestly, I No, I I totally agree. I totally agree with you. I mean, I' I've just been testing like LLMs on on finding

like browsing the internet for cars that I'm that I'm like interested in and they're just it's so

Yeah. You would assume that like AutoTempest is cooked and yet you can still go to like an AutoTist and search across all the cars, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

This is wild.

Totally. And that's not even to mention, I mean, my my experience on uh John John and I are are probably not good at at like event logistics. Like we just don't pay any attention to it. So whenever we're traveling, we're like,

"What airport are we going to? What [laughter] hotel are we at?" Like finding and and so Nick on our team, bless his heart, is just like kind of locked in around the clock when we're traveling to make sure. But and it would just be nice to be able to go

to a single place

in order. you can. And we thank you for coming on the show. Have a great day. Thanks so much for coming and hanging out.

Thanks. Thanks, Jordan. Appreciate it. And congrats, by the way. This is awesome.

Great to have you on. And and congrats to your whole team.

Yeah.

We'll see you soon.