Serko

Serko's roots go back to 1994, when Darrin Grafton and Bob Shaw founded Interactive Technologies Limited to solve travel agents' mid- and back-office problems. After selling ITL, they founded Serko in May 2007 around Serko Online — an online booking tool for corporate travel — later succeeded by the AI-driven Zeno platform.

Australia and New Zealand function as one corporate travel region: the same TMCs (travel management companies), the same dominant carrier relationships (Qantas, Air New Zealand), and heavy trans-Tasman business traffic. For a Kiwi booking-tool vendor, Australia wasn't a foreign market so much as the larger half of the home market.

Serko sold through TMCs — the agencies that manage corporate travel programs — rather than selling directly to thousands of corporates. Each TMC win brought a portfolio of corporate customers with it, letting a small Auckland company scale across Australia with minimal local salesforce.

Serko aligned early with Qantas on NDC (New Distribution Capability), the airline industry's direct-content standard. Through that partnership, Serko's Zeno became the first corporate travel platform to achieve IATA Level 3 NDC certification in 2018 — giving Serko-powered bookings access to Qantas content and pricing others couldn't match, in exactly the market where Qantas dominates corporate share.

Serko listed on the NZX in June 2014 (raising ~NZ$22M at $1.10/share), then added an ASX foreign-exempt listing in June 2018 — explicitly to access Australian institutional and retail investors in the country generating most of its revenue. Later, a 2019 partnership investment by Booking Holdings (4.7%) and the 2024 acquisition of Sabre's GetThere extended the playbook globally.

• Founder-led for three decades. Co-founders Darrin Grafton (CEO) and Bob Shaw (CSO) have run Serko since 2007 from the Saatchi & Saatchi building in Parnell, Auckland, growing to roughly 380 staff with offices across Australia, the US, India and China.
• Flight Centre as the anchor channel. Flight Centre Travel Group — whose corporate brands market and distribute Serko-powered booking tools — accounts for a significant share of Serko's AU/NZ booking volume; the partnership has been renewed and expanded repeatedly, including a 2018 extension to at least 2022 and an ongoing co-development fund for FCTG-specific features.
• Qantas as the technology partner. The NDC partnership gave Zeno first-mover access to Qantas direct content and pricing — with the airline that owns Australian corporate travel share.

• Channel leverage: TMC distribution multiplied every sales win into dozens of corporate accounts.
• Deep integration moat: booking tools embed into TMC workflows, expense systems and airline content pipes — switching costs are high.
• Airline content advantage: NDC-first status with Qantas made Serko the technically superior choice in the Qantas-dominated corporate market.
• Trans-Tasman adjacency: shared language, carriers and TMCs made Australia a low-friction first international market — the classic NZ scale-up path.

• June 2014: NZX IPO (~NZ$22M raise).
• June 2018: ASX foreign-exempt listing; CEO confirms the bulk of revenue comes from Australia.
• 2018: Zeno becomes first corporate travel platform with IATA Level 3 NDC certification (Qantas partnership).
• October 2019: Booking Holdings takes 4.7% stake in partnership deal.
• FY23 revenue NZ$48M, with FY24 guidance of NZ$63–70M; 6,000+ corporate customers across 35+ countries.

1. B2B2B channels are the cheapest market entry there is. Selling through intermediaries who already own the customer relationships converts their distribution into yours.
2. Certify into the incumbent's ecosystem. Being first to meet Qantas's technical standard made Serko the path of least resistance for the whole market.
3. List where your revenue lives. The ASX listing aligned Serko's capital base with its customer base and raised its profile with Australian corporates.
4. Treat adjacency as a launchpad, not a destination. Australian dominance funded and de-risked the later push into North America and Europe.