The startup that made booking a company offsite almost boring - which, if you have ever booked one, is the highest compliment there is.
The whole pitch fits in a search bar. Find or describe a destination, add rooms, add dates. Behind it: an AI that reads 4,000 hotel contracts so an ops manager on a deadline doesn't have to.
Booking 40 hotel rooms, a meeting space, and three dietary restrictions used to mean 40 emails and a phone call you dreaded. Marco turned it into a search box.
Here is a fact about the modern company that nobody puts on a recruiting page: for a distributed team, the annual offsite is often the only time the entire org stands in one room. It is the most important trip the company takes all year, and it is booked, almost universally, by whoever on the operations team drew the short straw. That person spends weeks trading emails with hotel sales desks, comparing rates that are deliberately hard to compare, and signing a room-block contract with cancellation terms written by lawyers who assumed nobody would read them.
Marco Experiences is a bet that this does not have to be miserable. The company, founded in San Francisco in 2019 by Suman Siva and Nick Freeman, sells something it calls "Instant Offsites": you type in a destination, the number of rooms, and your dates, and an AI searches more than 4,000 expert-vetted hotels to recommend the ones that fit. The rates it surfaces run 20 to 40 percent below retail. There are no phone calls, no contracts, and - this is the part that makes procurement departments blink - no service fees.
The economics are the interesting part. The average stay booked through Marco saves a team $25,686, and the company says it has saved teams a collective $71.56 million to date. That is not a coupon. It is the difference between the rate a hotel quotes a harried EA and the rate it quotes a platform that books group blocks all day and knows exactly what the room is worth. Marco's whole value is standing between those two numbers.
What makes this genuinely useful, rather than merely clever, is that the hard part of the offsite was never the booking screen. It was the judgment: is this hotel actually good, will the meeting room fit 30 people, can they feed a vegan and someone who keeps kosher at the same lunch. Marco vetted the 4,000 hotels so the customer doesn't have to gamble on one, and offers a full-service planning tier for teams that want a human to handle vendors, itineraries, and the guest who books their flight wrong.
The customer list does the arguing for them. Figma, Gusto, Ramp, Notion, Glossier, Olipop, SoFi, and Checkr have all run gatherings through Marco. These are companies that could staff an internal events team and choose, instead, to hand the logistics to a 22-person startup. That is the quiet tell of a good B2B product: elite companies will happily outsource the parts of work that nobody wants to own.
It became clear during the pandemic that one of the most important groups to bring together is the people we work with and spend 1/3rd of our lives with.
Marco did not start in hotels. It started trying to replace Facebook Events, and it kept the people while it changed the product.
Marco launches as a consumer social-events product - an attempt to build something better than Facebook Events for planning group gatherings.
With gatherings frozen, Marco pivots to virtual experiences and team building, then narrows toward the B2B channel where the demand actually was.
Slow Ventures and Flybridge lead a seed round, joined by The Community Fund, Jeff Housenbold, James Beshara, and Sonia Nagar of the Pritzker Group.
Marco positions itself around retreats and offsites for companies like Gusto, Figma, Checkr, and Glossier - hundreds of others follow.
Marco settles on group travel: an AI that searches 4,000+ hotels and books stays with no contracts or service fees. The search box becomes the product.
From a self-serve search to a fully staffed retreat, Marco meets teams wherever their planning tolerance runs out.
Type a destination, rooms, and dates. Marco's AI scans 4,000+ vetted hotels and returns group rates 20-40% below retail, bookable in one click - no contracts, no fees.
Prefer a human? Dedicated event designers and travel advisors handle venue selection, vendors, itineraries, guest management, and on-site logistics end to end.
Marco negotiates hotel blocks, meeting space, and on-property dining, passing exclusive savings and perks back to the team instead of a sales desk.
A curated catalog of 500+ in-person and virtual experiences with 300+ hand-picked hosts, from Joshua Tree Autocamp to a trivia night that doesn't make people cringe.
$2.87M is not a fat round. It bought a group-travel platform anyway - constraints tend to make better companies.
Bars are illustrative and scaled for comparison, not to a common dollar axis.
The ops, People, and EA teams at some of tech's most recognizable names.
Publicly referenced clients. 60,000+ experience attendees to date.
Marco is not alone in noticing that remote work made the company retreat sacred. It competes with specialists like TROOP, Surf Office, and Offsite, with the group-sales desks of traditional corporate travel agencies, and - most of all - with the default: a shared spreadsheet and someone booking hotels directly at retail. Marco's argument against all of them is the same one it makes on its homepage, in four words: fast, free, no contracts. In a category built on hidden service fees, saying the plain thing your competitors are afraid to say is itself a kind of moat.