Ande Raises $52M for Corporate Entertainment AI

A client dinner is supposed to feel effortless. Inside the enterprise paying for it, the same evening can touch an executive assistant, field marketer, manager, finance team, legal reviewer, venue salesperson, contract, payment, policy check, and expense report before anyone orders.

Ande has raised more than $52M across seed and Series A financing to make that hidden workflow manageable. The New York company emerged from stealth on September 22, 2026 with backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures.

Ande describes itself as an AI-native network for corporate entertainment. Its system connects enterprises booking dinners, offsites, sporting events, catering, and other experiences with the venues serving them, while carrying each request through discovery, availability, approvals, contracts, payments, and expense reconciliation.

The round matters because corporate entertainment sits in an awkward place between relationship building and spend control. Companies care deeply about the customer, employee, or partner experience, yet much of the infrastructure behind it still lives across email, consumer booking tools, credit cards, accounts-payable systems, and human memory.

What Ande Announced

In its funding announcement, Ande said it had raised more than $52M across seed and Series A rounds. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, and Sierra Ventures invested, with Bain Capital Ventures participating. The company did not disclose how much belonged to each round or the valuation.

That accounting matters. The announcement describes a combined financing history rather than one newly closed $52M Series A. It also gives Ande enough capital to emerge after roughly two and a half years of building its venue data, enterprise workflows, and two-sided network without requiring the story to pretend that capital alone proves the market.

The Information independently reported the financing and interviewed CEO and co-founder Lohit Sarma. Sarma said Ande uses models from OpenAI and Anthropic, routing work to different models based on task complexity. The company still keeps people involved in negotiation, where a mishandled interaction can damage the relationship the event was meant to strengthen.

The Workflow Behind the Experience

Ande is building for the work that happens before, during, and after a corporate experience. Employees can discover venues and experiences, coordinate details, and request bookings. The platform then handles availability, approvals, contracting, payment, policy visibility, and reconciliation inside a shared workspace used by executive assistants, office managers, field marketers, go-to-market teams, finance, and legal.

That scope is wider than a reservation tool. Corporate entertainment often behaves like unmanaged procurement wearing a dinner jacket: decentralized demand, incomplete supply data, variable pricing, relationship-sensitive negotiations, and a receipt trail that reaches finance after the context has disappeared. Ande's bet is that combining the buyer workflow with a direct venue network can make the category easier to control without making the experience feel controlled.

The supply side is central to the thesis. Sarma said the company spent about two and a half years working with venues to digitize information and train models and agents on enterprise-specific workflows. Availability, pricing, group requirements, private rooms, contract terms, and operational constraints often are not published in a format that a general-purpose agent can simply retrieve. Ande had to build the network before the software could act intelligently inside it.

Company-Reported Traction

Ande says more than 60 enterprises use the network, including Cloudflare, Salesforce, McGraw Hill, Netskope, Navan, Sigma Computing, monday.com, Workato, Semgrep, Checkout.com, and Rillet. The company reports that more than $400M in entertainment spend flows through the platform annually. That figure is booking or spend throughput, not Ande revenue.

The company also reports 93,000 entertainment providers across more than 90 cities, including 1,600 hospitality venues or partners. Its website says customers typically save 12% to 15% on spend run through the network. Those customer, volume, network, and savings figures are company-reported and have not been independently audited in the sources reviewed for this article.

Even with that qualification, the shape of the traction is useful. Enterprise demand gives venues access to larger recurring programs, while venue density gives enterprise teams more useful availability and pricing. Each side can make the other more valuable, provided Ande can maintain service quality and data accuracy as the network grows.

Leadership and Investor Logic

Ande's official team page identifies Lohit Sarma as CEO and co-founder and Michael McDermott as co-founder for engineering. Tal Yusov is the founding product lead. The company is headquartered in New York and is hiring across product, agentic AI, payments, design, recruiting, hospitality account management, and operations.

The investor group reflects the product's overlap between enterprise software, marketplaces, hospitality, payments, and AI. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures bring long operating histories in enterprise technology. Duration Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures add exposure across enterprise applications, infrastructure, commerce, and early-stage company building.

The financing thesis is less about teaching a model to recommend a restaurant than building reliable infrastructure around a high-stakes enterprise request. A booking can involve customer relationships, executive visibility, compliance rules, contract liability, budget ownership, and reputation. The company that coordinates those concerns well can become harder to replace than a consumer discovery interface.

Why Corporate Entertainment Is Becoming Managed Spend

Travel became a managed enterprise category because volume, policy, supplier relationships, employee experience, and financial controls eventually demanded shared infrastructure. Entertainment retains many of the same pressures, but the buying process is more fragmented and the supply is less standardized. A private dining room, sports suite, catered offsite, and customer event cannot be reduced to one inventory format without losing important context.

Ande is applying AI to the coordination burden rather than treating the model as the whole product. The agents can move information and tasks across a workflow, while the network supplies venue data and the enterprise layer supplies permissions, policy, and accountability. That combination is the commercial idea investors are financing.

The company still has demanding questions ahead. Public sources do not disclose revenue, retention, gross margins, booking-fee economics, or the amount of financing assigned to expansion. It must also prove that automation can reduce operational work while preserving the human judgment and negotiation that venue relationships require.

What the $52M Changes

The financing gives Ande more room to expand its network and product after emerging from stealth, but the deeper consequence sits with the category. Corporate entertainment has long been treated as a collection of individual events even when the spend, vendors, policies, and relationships form an enterprise program. Ande is trying to make that program visible enough to manage and flexible enough to remain human.

If the company succeeds, the advantage will come from the connective tissue: venue data that reflects reality, workflows that survive enterprise review, and enough trust on both sides to keep bookings moving. The dinner will still be judged by the room, the food, and the conversation. Ande is raising capital to make sure the machinery behind it stops intruding on the relationship it was supposed to support.