Naboo, a French startup founded just a few years ago, is attempting to provide a modern online experience for corporate seminar preparation. The firm just secured $8 million (€7.5 million) in investment and already processes over $1.5 million in transaction volume per month.
On paper, Naboo appears pretty easy. It’s a marketplace of beautiful homes that you can browse and book with a few clicks for your next business retreat with your team. However, the firm does not end there.
Naboo offers an all-inclusive experience for workplace seminars. In addition to a broad selection of locations, Naboo works with caterers around the country, understands the kinds of activities that are popular for offsite meetings, and can organize transportation for large groups.
The startup is not the first to focus on business lectures. However, Naboo is allowing clients to decide where they wish to go. This allows Naboo to target smaller sectors and arrange smaller seminars.
Essentially, Naboo is superior to having someone from the team search Airbnb or Booking.com for a location and then spend a few days preparing a corporate seminar and coordinating all of the little details. These activities are time-consuming, and in most cases, no one is formally in charge of business seminars.
Unlike professional agencies, Naboo shows everything on its website and allows buyers to decide. The platform is open regarding cost and availability.
“The main issue nowadays is that corporations prefer to hold seminars at the team level rather than the company level. Maxime Eduardo, Naboo co-founder and CEO, told me that they seek to increase team cohesion, which has become increasingly important in hybrid teams.
Many organizations no longer send employees to Marrakech for a week. They would rather offer a budget to a team leader and allow them to plan a modest retreat for 20 employees in a little town not far from the workplace.
ISAI, Kima Ventures, and Better Angle joined the company’s most recent fundraising round in November, along with current backers Cap Horn and MAIF Avenir. It currently works with 2,500 locations and 500 partners, including caterers and firms that offer activities.
The organization gets a 10-12% cut on reservations from homeowners, as well as a 6% cut on the client side. Naboo has a monthly transaction volume of about €1.5 million, which indicates its rapid growth.
Clients include Carrefour, Saint-Gobain, Orange, Renault, and several more publicly traded corporations. Some of Naboo’s largest clients prefer to work exclusively with them for all of their seminars. This makes it easy to track each team’s spending throughout several competitions.
Next, Naboo intends to include an AI browsing tool. Eduardo showed me a demo of this new solution, which works well with complex queries. It resembles a chatbot interface, but it uses Naboo’s database to respond to your requests.
For example, you may request a property with at least ten bedrooms, located less than two hours from Paris, near a train station, and equipped with a ping-pong table. Naboo will respond with probable residences that meet all of your parameters, organized neatly in a table.
In reality, this AI browsing tool would also be useful on Airbnb and Booking.com. I’m sure these tech titans are also working on AI goods, and it will be interesting to watch how these products will impact travel in the future.
