A travel management platform that helps companies save travel and process costs, time, and hassle—that's the promise of Lanes & Planes. CEO Veit Blumschein tells us more in an interview.
Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves briefly!
Veit Blumschein: We are Veit Blumschein and Daniel Nolte, founders of the business travel portal Lanes & Planes, which launched in 2017. Our journey together began in 2008, when Daniel Nolte and I founded the mobility and travel portal 'fromAtoB,' which was acquired by Tank & Rast in 2017.
At Lanes & Planes, in addition to my duties as CEO, I am responsible for product development. I met Daniel Nolte during our studies at RWTH Aachen University, where he completed his degree in computer science. He is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Lanes & Planes and also jointly responsible for our product development and our innovative software.
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Veit Blumschein: The idea was born out of personal necessity. I commuted between Aachen, Berlin, and Munich for two years, which meant I had to regularly organize travel connections. The digital process for organizing a trip took too long for us and, in our opinion, was far from mature in the digital age.
Holistic travel management platform
According to a recent VDR study, companies spend up to 1.5 hours per trip managing and organizing business trips for their employees. Lanes & Planes is the first travel management platform that combines all business travel processes, including travel expense reports and the ERP interface to accounting, into a single tool.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Veit Blumschein: With a market worth €40 billion in Germany alone, many providers are naturally trying to solve this problem. So far, no one has succeeded in providing a holistic solution for companies. This is precisely our unique selling point: end-to-end booking processes. Our holistic solution includes searches, (re)bookings, travel expense accounting, on-the-go apps, the transfer of travel data to downstream accounting systems, reporting, and the integration of travel policies into all processes. This means that at Lanes & Planes, we cover the entire booking and accounting cycle. With this comprehensive travel management solution, our customers save up to 30 percent of their direct and indirect travel costs.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Veit Blumschein: The biggest challenge was definitely finding partners and investors who shared our product-first vision of Lanes & Planes — not just with lip service to “Yes, product is important,” but who also gave us the time and money we needed to develop software that lived up to our vision of an end-to-end solution and didn’t want to force us into five different markets with a half-finished product.
Munich Startup: How are things going?
Veit Blumschein: We recently completed a $10 million Series A financing round through Battery Ventures. This financing round builds on our unique, holistic, end-to-end platform, which is considered the best solution on the market today, not only by our customers but also by our investors.
Target market Europe
Our current target market for the coming year remains the European market, as it is a strong market with an annual potential of €150 billion. The new investment opportunities will be used primarily to continue the tremendous customer growth and optimize the product offering.
Munich Startup: How do you rate Munich as a startup location?
Veit Blumschein: We were in Berlin with our previous startup and made a conscious decision to move to Munich. While there are certainly cheaper locations in Germany, what I personally like so much about Munich is that people get things done here, not just talk. The move from Berlin to Munich wasn't difficult for me personally, as I was born and raised in Munich, and I went to school here, so it was more like returning home.
Munich Startup: Get up early or stay up all night?
Veit Blumschein: Definitely getting up early! It's not like I can decide that, though; my seven-month-old son practically does it for me.
