Event: 2024 Phocuswright Conference
Product: Helios Trainer, PlanIt
HQ: New York, NY U.S.
Principal(s): Pratap Ranade, Co-Founder and CEO; Engin Ural, Co-Founder and CTO
Funding: Arena is a Series B startup that has raised ,$60M to-date from investors including Initialized Capital, Fifth Down Ventures, Founder’s Fund, and Goldcrest Capital.
Product Description: Partnering with NEOM, Arena has deployed two key products for travel and tourism excellence: Trainer, a gamified platform for employee onboarding and upskilling in tourism and hospitality, and Plan It, a travel assistant that helps tourists plan and manage their trips. Trainer helps scale a high-touch luxury service culture, and Plan It shares relevant behavior data with partners, enabling them to tailor services to each tourist's needs.
Business Model: Arena begins with one week “protoshops” to develop a working prototype. After identifying key use cases, pain points, and technical infrastructures, Arena will further build in a Proof of Concept development phase with a forward deployed and highly integrated development team, before moving into annual licenses.
Competitors: Arena aims to replace existing e-training platforms and “concierge-style” applications with our first-of-its-kind platform for guest experience and staff training.
Competitive Edge: Arena’s proprietary OneBrain model for consumer behavior uses Transformer architecture and reinforcement learning to harness bleeding edge technologies that accurately predict consumer behavior, demand, and sentiment. The applications are cutting edge in pushing the boundaries of guest service and personalization.
Market Opportunity: Arena believes our partnership with NEOM is only the beginning. Across travel and hospitality, we see opportunities to deploy our solutions with airlines and other transport, hotels, tour operators and staff, and any other segments that interact with travelers on the front lines, integrate many data sources or booking engines, and / or drive personalized traveler experiences. Our products are both traveler- and operator-facing, creating seamless integration.
Early Customers: We have partnered and launched our travel innovations with NEOM and are scoping expansion with additional players in the industry
