Repeat Founder Duo Secures $2.6M for Workgrounds: AI-Powered Hotel Room Block Sourcing and Management

Repeat founders Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom have raised $2.6 million for Workgrounds, a startup solving hotel room block management for group bookings. Workgrounds already has clientele from fast-growing companies, including SeatGeek, RevenueCat, and Yieldmo, as demand for the product soars. Investors in this pre-seed funding round include Oceans Ventures, Hannah Grey, Volo Ventures, and deftly.vc.

In 2010, Nikhil Sethi and Garrett Ullom launched Adaptly, an ad-tech platform they built as students at Northwestern University. Adaptly helped marketers purchase targeted ads across major online platforms like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, ultimately scaling to over 200 employees before being acquired by Accenture in 2018. Now, the duo has launched Workgrounds, a B2B startup aimed at revolutionizing corporate travel logistics. Just like their previous venture, Workgrounds targets a massive market dominated by a few large players and ripe for user-side automation to streamline a complex process.

“We were stunned to see how manual the end-to-end process is for sourcing, negotiating, and managing hotel room blocks for corporate groups—a repetitive process that occurs millions of times each year,” said Nikhil Sethi, co-founder of Workgrounds. “Our goal is to leverage AI and automation to vastly improve the experience for companies, enabling them to manage hundreds of room blocks simultaneously through a user-friendly software interface, without requiring hotels to change their existing processes.”

Workgrounds is building a comprehensive tech stack to eliminate the inefficiencies of manual processes in corporate group travel. The platform allows organizations to easily input their team’s locations or sync with their HRIS systems, and in a single click, initiate automated AI-driven requests for proposals from hotel suppliers in any target market. By optimizing group bookings, Workgrounds can help organizations save up to 31% on room costs—savings often missed without automation. The platform automatically filters and analyzes proposals, providing planners with high-quality options instantly. Workgrounds’ AI also manages change orders and negotiations, offering a seamless, time-saving solution for all parties involved.

“We designed the experience with travel planners, finance teams, and guests in mind, delivering a modern, functional interface that allows organizations to manage room blocks for hundreds of teams and thousands of travelers with ease,” Sethi added.

SeatGeek’s Director of Workplace Services, Gerard Visser, praised Workgrounds’ efficiency: “It has been a game-changer for us, reducing the time to secure room blocks from weeks to days. This lets us focus more on creating memorable events and less on logistics.”

The rise of remote and flexible work has accelerated the adoption of Workgrounds, as companies adapt to distributed teams and increased travel demands. Reflecting on their time with Adaptly, the founders saw this shift as an opportunity for AI-powered solutions to improve control and reduce costs in corporate travel.

“We built Workgrounds as the tool we would have wanted at Adaptly and later at Accenture,” explained Garrett Ullom, co-founder of Workgrounds. “Starting with room blocks, we see huge potential to simplify corporate travel for scaling teams.”