Mark Essien, founder/CEO and CTO of Hotels.ng, has started a new company, TripDesk, that leverages AI to automate the travel approval and hotel booking process at organisations. Corporate travel across Africa is still handled through a patchwork of emails, WhatsApp threads, spreadsheets, and paper forms. For large organisations, especially banks and telcos, that fragmentation slows approvals, weakens oversight, and creates reconciliation gaps. “The complexity of an individual travel case is often five times more complex in Africa than in the West,” Essien said. “We created a solution that addresses logistics, financing, and complex approvals directly.” TripDesk’s system is organised around approvals rather than bookings. Procurement, HR, and finance teams manage travel through a shared dashboard where requests move through defined layers, from managers to financial controllers. Executives can approve directly from email. Budgets are set by team, department, or executive tier. Before TripDesk, Essien's Hotels.ng had aggregated about 14,000 hotels in Nigeria. His first startup, launched in 2013, was one of the few successes from an era where venture capital was scarce in Africa. In 2015, Hotels.ng raised $1.2 million in Series A from EchoVC and Omidyar Network and became an African travel powerhouse. Its focus is on individuals who are searching for hotels to stay at. However, now with TripDesk, he is targeting businesses and organisations characterised by higher ticket sizes in fewer transactions compared to direct consumers. Within four months of public launch, it crossed $2.3 million in revenue. By month two, it broke even. The company attributes its early break-even point to enterprise contracts that bring predictable revenue, rather than the piecemeal usage-driven pricing common with SaaS products. "Our clients are extremely happy with the solution, and we are rapidly expanding even within organizations we have already signed," Essien said. TripDesk has raised a seed round comprising equity and debt. Existing investors in Hotels.ng have been given a deal they are happy with, and TripDesk's operations do not hamper that of Hotels.ng. Essien told Condia that, "Hotelsng continues to operate as usual, and the investors have been given a deal they are happy with." TripDesk has already begun servicing its debt obligations, delivering early yields to investors. The company is headquartered in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria, the founder's hometown.
