myRiva

Here is a fact about corporate travel software that everyone in the industry knows and almost nobody says out loud: most of it is bad, and it is bad on purpose. The incumbents built their systems decades ago, wired them to a handful of preferred suppliers, and then discovered that opacity was profitable. If you cannot see all the fares, you cannot complain about the markup on the ones you can. This is a fine business model right up until someone builds the alternative.

myRiva is that someone, or is trying to be. The company - founded in 2016 as Onriva, headquartered in Foster City, California, and rebranded in 2025 - describes itself as an open travel marketplace for business. The pitch is structurally simple. Instead of steering a traveler toward a curated list of suppliers, myRiva says it pulls rates and inventory from more than two million of them - airlines, hotels, ground transport, intermediaries - and lets a patented AI engine figure out which combination actually fits the traveler and the company's policy. Suppliers compete; the software matches; the price is what it is.

The word "marketplace" is doing a lot of work here, and it is worth pausing on why. A marketplace is not the same thing as a search engine, though from the traveler's seat they can look identical. The difference is on the supply side. In myRiva's telling - and this is essentially the thesis its CTO keeps returning to - a supplier who can fully merchandise its inventory in a competitive venue will offer better terms than one hidden inside a legacy distribution deal. Open the doors, let everyone in, and the prices sort themselves out. It is an old idea. It also happens to be the idea that eBay and Expedia were built on, which is relevant, because the person building myRiva's technology helped build both of those.

That person is Mike Remedios, myRiva's chief technology officer, who previously ran engineering at Lastminute.com, Expedia and eBay. The founder and CEO, Vajid Jafri, spent more than 25 years inside the travel industry and launched several travel and travel-technology companies before this one. This matters more than the usual founder-bio boilerplate, because myRiva's whole premise is that the industry's problems are load-bearing - they hold up somebody's revenue - and knowing which assumptions are habit versus which are architecture requires having lived inside them. Jafri did not arrive with a disruption deck and a whiteboard. He arrived with scars.

The technology underneath is a stack of acronyms that mostly resolve to "we tried to make this modern." There is NDC - New Distribution Capability, the airline industry's newer standard for how fares and ancillaries get distributed, which myRiva adopted early. There is machine learning for the fare-matching and personalization. There is conversational voice technology, because someone decided you should be able to talk to the thing. None of these are individually revolutionary. Bundled together and aimed at a market that has been running on 50-year-old plumbing, they add up to a plausible argument that the plumbing can be replaced.

But the most telling product decision at myRiva is not the AI. It is the humans. The company markets, in a phrase that tells you something about its self-image, "24/7 Live Agent Awesomeness" - US-based travel agents available around the clock. In a decade where the reflexive move is to automate the customer entirely out of the loop, myRiva looked at the hardest part of travel - the 2am cancellation, the missed connection, the itinerary that has quietly become impossible - and decided a person should handle it. This is not a failure of automation nerve. It is a reading of where trust actually gets earned. The robot books the trip. The human saves it.

Who is this for? Not, notably, the Fortune 100. myRiva has aimed squarely at small and mid-sized companies - the segment that legacy corporate travel management traditionally underserves because it is fragmented and unglamorous. The numbers the company reports suggest the bet is landing: more than 3,500 companies on the platform, representing over $3 billion in annual travel purchasing volume, across a wide range of industries. The mid-market, it turns out, was not waiting for enterprise tools to trickle down. It was waiting for someone to build for it directly.

The rebrand from Onriva to myRiva, in 2025, is a small case study in the discipline of naming. The product barely changed. What changed was the promise embedded in the word. "Onriva" was a company you booked through. "myRiva" - my - is a service that claims to know you. The company framed it as reflecting "strategic advancements in delivering increasingly personalized and intelligent travel solutions," which is corporate for: we decided the personalization was the point, so we put it in the name. Whether the product fully earns the pronoun is the open question every personalization pitch has to answer. But the instinct - name the thing after what it does for the customer, not what it says about you - is sound.

There is one feature that captures myRiva's whole balancing act, and it is the real-time traveler dashboard. It shows a manager where every traveling employee is, at any given moment. Described one way, that is surveillance. Described the way myRiva describes it - duty of care - it is the legal and moral obligation companies have to keep their people safe on the road, made operational. Same data, two framings, and the entire difference between "creepy" and "responsible" lives in which framing the customer believes. myRiva has bet on the second. Given that its buyers are the managers who carry that obligation, it is a reasonable bet.

The funding - roughly $60 million to date, with backers including Evolution VC Partners - was raised into a headwind. For a stretch after 2020, the consensus was that business travel was structurally dead, permanently replaced by video calls. myRiva raised against that consensus, on the wager that people would travel again but would only tolerate it if the trip were worth the friction. That is either contrarian conviction or expensive optimism, and which one it turns out to be depends on data that is still coming in. What is not in dispute is that the company is still here, at around 66 employees across three continents, still booking trips, still answering the phone at 2am.