The software layer for the least glamorous corner of corporate travel: booking a hundred hotel rooms without losing a week to phone tag.
The wordmark. A tidy name for a messy problem - the group hotel block, finally handed to software.
It is a Tuesday, and someone whose title has nothing to do with travel is coordinating fifty rooms for an offsite. They have a spreadsheet with hotel names, a browser with nine open tabs, and an inbox full of PDFs that all say roughly the same thing in different fonts. They have been at this for a week. They will be at it for another. This is not an edge case. This is how most companies - including, reportedly, Google and Apple - still book group hotel stays in the age of self-driving cars.
Workgrounds looked at that Tuesday and decided it was absurd. The New York company, founded in 2022, builds AI agents that do the part everyone hates: sourcing hotels, sending requests for proposals, reading the replies, and negotiating the group rate. You tell it where your people are - or connect your HR system and let it figure that out - and it fans out RFPs across a market with a single click. The proposals come back; the software parses them; the haggling happens in the background.
The pitch is not that group travel is glamorous. It is that group travel is plumbing, and plumbing deserves software. Roughly 31% of potential savings on a group booking evaporate when the process is manual - the wrong rate accepted, the better hotel never contacted, the change order that slipped. Workgrounds' argument is that those percentage points add up to real money across a $75-billion U.S. corporate travel market, and that no one should have to earn them by refreshing an inbox.
What makes the company worth a second look is not the idea alone but the people running at it. This is a second act, and the first one landed.
Workgrounds is built for the people who actually book the trips - travel managers, executive assistants, event and offsite planners - and for the hotel sales teams on the other end. The interface stays familiar; the automation hides underneath.
Send requests to every relevant hotel in a market at once, instead of emailing them one by one and waiting.
Agents read and compare the returning proposals, so you are not squinting at nine PDFs in different formats.
The platform handles group-rate negotiation and change orders behind the scenes, chasing the savings you'd otherwise miss.
Consumer-style booking pages for guests, with centralized management and reconciliation for the team running it.
Connect your HR system and source room blocks by team location - no manual data entry required.
Add flight coordination alongside hotel blocks for end-to-end group travel in one place.
Illustrative, based on SeatGeek's reported shift from a multi-week process to days.
"Our ability to secure room blocks for our teams has gone from a multi-week process to just days, making the platform essential."— Gerard Visser, Director of Workplace Services, SeatGeek
Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom are not first-timers. Their earlier company, Adaptly, was an advertising-technology firm that raised $13.2 million and sold to Accenture in 2018. Sethi ran into the group-booking problem while leading Adaptly's roughly 200 employees, then watched it persist inside a company of some 800,000 after the acquisition. The problem, it turned out, did not care how big you were.
So the pair regrouped around it. The bet is straightforward: apply AI to a workflow that has resisted software for decades, and keep the surface simple enough that no one needs training. As Sethi put it, the goal was to "100x the experience for companies to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel."
Co-Founder & CEO. Previously co-founded Adaptly (acquired by Accenture, 2018).
Co-Founder. Adaptly co-founder; back for the second venture with Sethi.
"We wanted to apply AI and other automation to 100x the experience for companies to easily manage hundreds of room blocks in parallel."— Nikhil Sethi, Co-Founder & CEO, Workgrounds
Fast-growing companies with 100 to 5,000 employees, and larger enterprises organizing offsites, conferences, and events. Named customers include SeatGeek, RevenueCat, and Yieldmo, with target sectors spanning tech, associations, government, sports, and events.
Cut room-block sourcing from a multi-week process to days.
Among the early customers booking group stays through the platform.
Uses Workgrounds to coordinate corporate group travel.
Sethi and Ullom regroup around the group-travel problem in New York.
First version ships, with rapid quarterly growth reported.
Oceans Ventures, Hannah Grey, Volo Ventures, and deftly.vc back the round.