Avi Meir

Who is Avi Meir?

Avi Meir is the co-founder and CEO of TravelPerk, the Barcelona-based business travel platform that has grown into one of Europe's most prominent SaaS success stories. When Meir took the SaaStock Europe 2022 stage, he introduced himself with characteristic directness: "Hi, everybody. I'm Avi from TravelPerk." That plainspoken framing is telling. Rather than open with abstractions, he led with the concrete problem his company set out to solve and the journey it had taken to get there.

TravelPerk, as Meir described it, replaces the "old-school legacy travel agent" with "the modern SaaS way of booking and managing trips." He and his co-founders started the company in Barcelona in 2016, and by the time of his SaaStock appearance the business had, in his own words, "just crossed $100 million in ARR." That milestone did not come easily. As Meir noted, the company hit "a little bump on the road" — the COVID pandemic, which "impacted the travel industry somewhat." Few categories were hit harder by global lockdowns than business travel, and the fact that TravelPerk not only survived but "still managed to grow pretty fast" through what Meir called "a couple of years of interesting times" is central to his story.

His SaaStock talk framed that resilience through the lens of company values, arguing that following one core rule was what carried TravelPerk into the unicorn club. This page collects Avi Meir's recorded SaaStock talks with transcripts, so founders and operators can learn directly from how he built and scaled a category-defining travel SaaS business through one of the most turbulent stretches the industry has ever faced.

About TravelPerk

TravelPerk is a business travel platform founded in Barcelona in 2016. As Meir explained on the SaaStock stage, the company offers an alternative to the traditional corporate travel agent — "the modern SaaS way of booking and managing trips" — giving companies a single, software-first product for arranging and overseeing employee travel rather than relying on legacy agencies and fragmented manual processes.

The category TravelPerk competes in — business travel management — is one that had long resisted modernization, dominated by incumbents and offline workflows. Meir's pitch positions TravelPerk as the SaaS-native challenger to that status quo, bringing the self-serve, scalable model familiar from other software categories to a corner of the market that had been slow to adopt it. By the time of his 2022 SaaStock talk, that bet had paid off to the tune of a self-reported $100 million in ARR.

What makes TravelPerk's trajectory notable is when it happened. The company was scaling directly into the COVID pandemic, a crisis that gutted the travel sector and would have been existential for many travel-dependent startups. Meir acknowledged the impact candidly, describing "a couple of years of interesting times," yet emphasized that the company "still managed to grow pretty fast." His talk attributes much of that durability to the company's values and the single rule he credits with guiding TravelPerk into the unicorn club — a culture-first thesis about how disciplined principles, rather than tactics alone, carry a company through crisis.

Key lessons from Avi Meir's talks

Modernize a category the incumbents ignored. TravelPerk's wedge was offering "the modern SaaS way of booking and managing trips" in place of the "old-school legacy travel agent." Meir's story is a reminder that large, unglamorous, software-resistant categories can be enormous opportunities for a founder willing to rebuild the experience from first principles.

Values are a survival mechanism, not a poster on the wall. Meir's SaaStock talk centered on how following one rule led TravelPerk to the unicorn club. The lesson: a clear, consistently applied set of values is what gives a company the cohesion to make hard calls and keep growing when the environment turns hostile.

You can grow through a crisis that hits your category hardest. Few industries were as devastated by COVID as business travel, yet Meir reported that TravelPerk "still managed to grow pretty fast" through "a couple of years of interesting times." Adversity specific to your market does not have to be fatal — and surviving it can become a defining part of the company's identity.

Lead with the concrete. Meir's framing — naming the customer's old problem, describing the modern alternative, and stating the milestone plainly — is a model for how founders should talk about their companies: less jargon, more clarity about what you replace and how far you've come.