Concur co-founder and former CEO Steve Singh and a group of investors have acquired Denver-area corporate travel company Direct Travel.
Direct Travel has about 1,800 employees but its team is largely distributed across North America, Singh said. Roughly 40 employees are based in the Seattle area, but the company doesn't have an office here.
"I'm here. We have other members of the executive team that are joining," Singh said. "It's not unreasonable to assume we'll grow the Seattle footprint."
The firms are not disclosing terms of the deal. Singh said Direct Travel will keep its brand.
Related coverage
Direct Travel, founded in 2011, helps clients manage corporate travel. Its services include travel planning, cost savings tools and travel risk management. According to Singh, Direct Travel is growing its revenue by about 8% to 9% per year, but he said the company could double that.
In addition to its Denver-area headquarters, Direct Travel lists on its website offices in San Jose, California; Minneapolis; Toronto; Montreal; and Stamford, Connecticut. Direct Travel founder and CEO Ed Adams will retire as part of the acquisition. Singh said Adams will remain an adviser to the company.
Christal Bemont, who spent almost 16 years at Concur and served as chief revenue officer, will become Direct Travel's CEO. Singh said she is based in the Atlanta area. She also spent about three years as CEO of the data management company Talend, according to her LinkedIn page.
Singh added that the whole Direct Travel team is staying on, and he could see the company adding a few hundred employees over the next year. Direct Travel has 27 openings listed on its website
Other investors involved in the acquisition include Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, Durable Capital Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners and Blackstone Credit and Insurance.
Singh co-founded Bellevue-based Concur, an expense management company, in 1993. He grew the company to roughly 5,000 employees and sold it to software giant SAP for $8.3 billion in 2014. He stayed at SAP for close to three years and led developer tool Docker as CEO for about two years. He is now a managing director at Madrona.
"These are investors that I've worked with for a couple of decades now," Singh said. "These are all very trusted relationships where we have a common view of what's happening in the industry and what the potential is."
