New York-based company Ande has emerged from stealth mode, announcing the completion of over $52 million in seed and Series A funding. Investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures. The company positions itself as an AI-native network for corporate entertainment, using agents to help businesses organize employee or client events.

Founder and CEO Lohit Sarma stated that corporate entertainment is one of the most important yet least structured expenses for companies: one side needs to book venues and experiences, while the other side requires financial and legal approvals. Ande has created an agent workflow that integrates venue inventory, bookings, approval routing, contract signing, and reimbursement reconciliation, allowing administrative staff, office managers, frontline marketing, and GTM to collaborate on team-building and closing dinners on the same platform.

The company claims to have digitized venue data and trained proprietary processes over the past two and a half years. More than 60 companies are currently using the platform for entertainment expenses, including Cloudflare, Salesforce, McGraw Hill, Netskope, Navan, Sigma Computing, Monday.com, Workato, Semgrep, Checkout, and Rillet, with an annual transaction volume exceeding $400 million and a network covering over 90 cities and 90,000 suppliers. Companies report savings of approximately 12% to 15%.

The product's selling point is to bring "the last unmanaged corporate expense" into a single system: the business side places orders while finance and legal monitor every dollar. Venues gain direct access to corporate booking channels instead of relying solely on sales emails and personal deals with assistants. Alex Bard from Redpoint noted that the investment is based on the founder's entrepreneurial background and experience on the corporate side.

In market mechanics, this represents venture capital transforming "experience spending" beyond travel and dining into an auditable flow: buyers are budget-conscious companies and venues seeking stable clientele; sellers are Ande, which uses agents to eliminate friction between assistants and suppliers, taking a cut from transactions or software. Funds from VCs are directed towards customer acquisition and venue digitization, with $400 million GMV serving as current scale proof. Beneficiaries include venues already onboarded and CFOs needing reports; those under pressure are event planning intermediaries relying on personal connections and scattered reimbursement forms within companies. The event driver is the end of stealth mode and the disclosure of a round of mergers, rather than a single large client contract.

As corporate events transition from email threads to an auditable network, venue inventory finally has a distribution layer aimed at businesses.

Source: Public Information