Ande, the AI native platform for corporate entertainment, has emerged from stealth with over $52 million in seed and Series A funding to digitize a fragmented $325 billion spend category already processing $400 million annually for more than 60 enterprises.
Ande emerges from stealth raising more than $52 million in combined seed and Series A funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, and Sierra Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures.
Ande positions itself as the AI native network and “entertainment operating system” for enterprises. It targets corporate entertainment spend (client dinners, team outings, catering, sporting events, offsites, and gifting) an estimated $325 billion annual category that has remained highly fragmented. Traditional processes rely on consumer apps, credit cards, AP systems, and manual reconciliation, leaving finance and legal teams with limited visibility and control while creating friction for the teams that book experiences.
What is Ande’s technology?
The platform provides a shared multiplayer workspace for executive assistants, office managers, field marketers, go to market teams, and managers. Agentic AI workflows handle the full lifecycle: surfacing venue availability, booking experiences, routing approvals, executing contracts, processing payments, and reconciling expenses automatically. This unifies discovery, planning, booking, compliance, and spend management into one system while delivering real time visibility into every dollar.
On the supply side, Ande functions as a dedicated corporate sales and marketing channel for venues that historically lacked direct access to enterprise buyers. The company spent approximately 2.5 years digitizing venue data and training models/agents on enterprise specific workflows. The network now includes over 93,000 entertainment venues across 90+ cities, with 1,600 hospitality partners. Notable partners include Nobu, Tao Group Hospitality, Wolfgang Puck, Altamarea Group, The Mina Group, and others. Venues gain preferred corporate rates and a scalable pipeline into enterprise demand.
More than 60 enterprises already use the platform, including Cloudflare, Salesforce, McGraw Hill, Netskope, Navan, Sigma Computing, Monday.com, Workato, Semgrep, Checkout, and Rillet. These customers drive over $400 million in annual entertainment spend through Ande and report savings of 12–15%. Customer feedback highlights operational relief: teams shift from logistics to higher value relationship and program work, with real time visibility across high stakes events.
CEO and co-founder Lohit Sarma has framed entertainment as critical for culture, deal-closing, and relationships, while calling the existing infrastructure “broken on both sides of every transaction.” He emphasizes that Ande is the first true enterprise grade channel connecting corporate buyers with entertainment vendors.
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Investors highlight the scale of the unmanaged spend category and the founder’s combination of startup DNA and enterprise experience. Arif Janmohamed (Lightspeed Venture Partners / Duration Ventures) described Ande as “the connective tissue, the perfect handshake between corporations and venues,” noting the market opportunity as largely unbounded. Redpoint’s Alex Bard pointed to Sarma’s ambition and dual expertise as the foundation for confidence in an early stage company tackling a large problem.
The $52 million raise ranks in the 98th percentile of all time U.S. Series A rounds in the media category, underscoring investor conviction that corporate entertainment represents one of the last large, unmanaged enterprise spend categories ripe for digitization.
The capital supports deeper AI capabilities, further expansion of the venue network, and scaled go to market efforts with large enterprises seeking tighter control over discretionary spend. Ande creates a two sided marketplace effect: enterprises gain structured booking, compliance, savings, and data on relationship building activities, while venues obtain a previously missing corporate distribution channel. Over time, the platform is positioned to integrate more deeply with broader expense, procurement, and financial systems.
By combining agentic automation, a dense digitized supply network, and proven early enterprise adoption with measurable savings, Ande is building infrastructure for a high volume, previously opaque category of corporate spend.
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