Vervotech

Sanjay Garry spent over a decade at Taviska (a JP Morgan Chase division) as Vice President of their SaaS operations, giving him deep insight into the travel tech ecosystem. He identified a critical inefficiency: when travel agencies like Expedia source hotels from 100+ suppliers, the same hotel often appears 50+ times with different IDs, rates, and naming conventions. There's no standardization—a "Hilton" could be a five-star property or a one-star property on the same street. This creates booking confusion and prevents agencies from accurately consolidating the best rates across suppliers. Over 100 companies were already attacking this problem, but Garry saw operational inefficiencies he could fix.

Garry launched Vervotech in October 2018 with four other co-founders. The timing was challenging: just nine months after launch, COVID-19 hit, wiping out the travel industry. Rather than raise money during the chaos, the team made a strategic decision to bootstrap and use the pandemic to build a better product. They started by targeting the top six hotel suppliers, focusing deeply on solving the standardization problem with a master ID system that could uniquely identify every property globally—no matter how suppliers named or described it.

It took seven months from launch to land the first paying customer. That customer is still with them today, paying around $30,000 per year. In the desperation to prove product-market fit, Garry locked them into a seven-year contract at fixed pricing. As he reflected: "In the early days, when you really desperately wanted your customer, you do actually these kinds of things." This first win validated the model—customer acquisition costs, though not disclosed, proved sustainable enough that pricing eventually stabilized around $1,200/month average per customer ($12k-$100k annual range, depending on usage).

What worked: a diversified go-to-market combining events, Google Ads, SEO, and inside sales outreach. The company grew 70-75% year-over-year for the last two years, adding net new customers (not just deepening existing ones). The bootstrapped profitability model—targeting 30% EBITDA margins and distributing 25% of profits annually to employees as profit-sharing—kept the team aligned and motivated without external capital pressure.

What didn't work: the early ad-hoc pricing strategy and long-term fixed-price contracts. After two and a half years of custom-per-customer pricing, Garry eventually moved to publicly transparent, annually increasing pricing. This matured the company's commercial operation.

By the time of acquisition, Vervotech had grown to 200+ paying customers powering over 1,000 websites globally, generating $240k MRR ($2.88M ARR annualized). The company was acquired by Constellation Software in late 2024 under its Juniper Group travel tech operating unit, which already held 14 travel tech companies. Garry chose Constellation specifically for cultural alignment: their ROI-focused operations, transparency across the portfolio, and willingness to let acquired companies operate independently while providing best practices support. Garry remained CEO with continued profit-sharing incentives, positioned to accelerate expansion into Europe and South America—markets where Constellation's portfolio had established relationships but Vervotech had no presence.