Madrona backs new startup tackling corporate guest travel

Juno, a platform designed to help manage corporate guest travel, raised $2 million in seed funding, the company announced Tuesday.

The round was Seattle-based Madrona and Bungalow Ventures. Steve Singh, managing director at Madrona and co-founder of Concur, led the investment for Madrona.

Denver-based Juno sees guest travel as a major pain point for companies that have already modernized employee travel with booking tools and automation. When it comes to guests — such as recruits, contractors, trainees, speakers, and customers — many companies still depend on travel agents, spreadsheets, and long email threads to manage their trips.

Juno’s platform guides coordinators and their guests through booking, logistics, payments, reimbursements, and reconciliation.

Portland, Ore.-based Devon Tivona and Denver-based Sam Felsenthal are co-CEOs and co-founders at Juno. They previously co-founded Pana, another corporate guest travel platform, that was acquired by Coupa in 2021.

“Guest travel has always been the glaring gap in the corporate travel stack,” Tivona said in a news release. “Guests don’t have logins. They don’t have corporate cards. They don’t know the travel policy. And yet, these are often the most important trips a company coordinates. The legacy tools just aren’t built for this.”

Singh co-founded the travel and expense management giant Concur, which was acquired by SAP in 2014 for $8.3 billion. He called guest travel a “glaring blind spot” in the corporate travel ecosystem.

“It’s still manual, fragmented, and underserved,” Singh said in a statement. “Juno is solving that with a modern, integrated platform built for today’s enterprises and their most important travelers. This team knows the space better than anyone.”

Singh has been busy investing in various travel-related startups. He led a group of investors in the April 2024 acquisition of Direct Travel Inc., a Colorado-based corporate travel management company, and is executive chairman of Otto, a Seattle-based startup developing an AI virtual assistant for business travel booking.

Singh also serves as executive chairman at Spotnana, a travel-as-a-service technology platform (he’s currently also interim CEO); Troop, a group meetings and events company; and Center, a corporate card and expense management platform that is being acquired by American Express.