Nabu offers an AIbnb-like experience for company seminars
Naboo, a French company formed just a few years ago, is trying to create a modern online experience for company seminar planning. The startup recently raised an $8 million funding round (€7.5 million) and is already processing over $1.5 million transactions per month.
On paper, Naboo is quite simple. It’s a marketplace of great homes that you can browse and book in just a few clicks for your next corporate retreat with your team. But the company does not stop here.
Nabu provides an all-in-one experience for company seminars. In addition to a large list of venues, Nabu also works with caterers around the country, knows activities that may be popular for offsite meetings and can arrange transportation for larger groups.
The startup company isn’t the first to specialize in seminars. But Nabu is empowering customers to decide where they want to go. In this way, Naboo can address smaller classes and conduct smaller seminars.
Essentially, it works better than having someone from the Naboo team browse Airbnb or booking.com to find a place and then spend a few days organizing company seminars and organizing all the little details. These tasks take time and often no one is officially in charge of the company seminars.
Unlike professional agencies, Naboo displays everything on its website and lets customers decide. The platform is clear about pricing and availability.
“The real issue today is that companies want to conduct seminars more at the team level than at the company level. They want to improve team cohesion as this has become essential with hybrid teams,” Maxim Eduardo, co-founder and CEO of Naboo, told me.
Many companies no longer send everyone to Marrakech for a week. They would instead give a team leader a budget and let them organize a small retreat with 20 employees in a small town not far from the office.
ISAI, Kima Ventures and Better Angle participated in the company’s most recent funding round from November, along with existing investors Cap Horn and Maff Avenir. It now works with 2,500 venues and 500 partners, such as caterers and companies that can provide activities.
The company takes a 10 to 12% cut on bookings from homeowners, and a 6% cut on the client side. With around €1.5 million monthly transaction volume, you can immediately calculate that Naboo is growing well.
Clients include Carrefour, Saint-Gobain, Orange, Renault and many other publicly traded companies. Some of Naboo’s largest clients choose to work exclusively with them for all their seminars. This way, it becomes easier to track each team’s budget across multiple events.
Next, Nabu wants to add an AI browsing feature. Eduardo showed me a demo of this upcoming product, and it works well for complex requests. It resembles a chatbot interface, but it leverages Nabu’s database to answer your questions.
For example, you could ask for a house with at least 10 bedrooms that is less than two hours from Paris, not far from a train station, and has a ping-pong table. Naboo will respond with a table of potential homes with all your criteria neatly sorted in one table.
Actually, this AI browsing feature will also work well on Airbnb and booking.com. I am sure these tech giants are also working on AI products and it will be interesting to see what impact these products will have on travel in the future.