Irish workforce travel company Roomex has been bought by US-based Fleetcor for an undisclosed sum.
The deal will see Fleetcor extend its business to Europe, provide a platform for future international expansion and give Roomex access to new markets.
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to close in November. Once completed, Roomex will continue to operate with its management team.
“Fleetcor see us as a leader in this whole area of workforce travel, and they want to continue to grow our business, both in the markets were already in but also to expand into into other markets,” said chief executive of Roomex Garry Moroney. “We have a model to continue to grow at close to 100 per cent over the next number of years and so everybody will be staying in their roles, but we’ll be continuing to to grow our organisation, in terms of our engineering teams and our sales teams.”
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The company, which currently employs around 100 people, expects to increase its headcount by around 50 to 100 per cent over the next year.
“Travel went through quite a difficult time over the last couple of years, but we came through it really well and we’ve already doubled our businesses since pre COVID,” Mr Mooney said.
Founded in 2006 by Jack Donaghy and Karl Glennon, Roomex developed a dedicated business travel booking and expenses platform, which is used by companies in Ireland, the UK and Germany. It provides small and medium sized businesses with an easy way to manage corporate travel.
The Dublin-headquartered company, which also has offices in London and Munich, has around 600 workforce business customers, clocking up stays in 50,000 hotels.
In 2018, the travel software company raised €8 million in a Series A funding round led by Dublin and London-listed venture capital firm Molten ventures, formerly Draper Esprit, with support from existing shareholders Frontline Ventures and Harmony Capital. Other previous backers of the company include Hostelworld chairman Paddy Holohan and Manna founder Bobby Healy.
Roomex and Fleetcor had already worked together, with subsidiaries of the latter having existing partnerships with Roomex.
Fleetcor‘s business is primarily based in the US, booking tens of millions of hotel room nights annually across a network of 45,000 hotel properties.
“Roomex gives us a very similar workforce lodging business in Europe. It provides us a base of operations, expertise and a hotel network from which we can build out the lodging business across Europe while leveraging the significant client base we already have there,” said Ron Clarke, chairman and chief executive officer.
