Ande Company Spotlight: Managing Corporate Entertainment

Ande is building an AI-native operating layer for corporate entertainment, connecting enterprise teams that book dinners, offsites, sports, catering, gifting, and other experiences with the providers that serve them. The platform coordinates discovery, availability, approvals, contracts, payments, policy visibility, and expense reconciliation inside one workflow.

CEO and Co-Founder Lohit Sarma leads Ande with Michael McDermott, Co-Founder, Engineering, and Tal Yusov, Founding Product Lead. The New York company also lists a San Francisco office and operates across enterprise software, hospitality, payments, procurement, and AI.

Ande matters now because corporate entertainment has become a meaningful enterprise program without acquiring the infrastructure that travel, procurement, and expense management already expect. The event is personal. The workflow behind it is often a pile of inboxes, card charges, approvals, contracts, and receipts hoping nobody asks a difficult question at quarter-end.

About Ande

Ande describes itself as the corporate entertainment network connecting enterprises with entertainment providers. Current reporting places the company's founding in 2024, after Sarma, McDermott, and Yusov had worked together at Lifion, an enterprise software business inside ADP.

The founding idea starts with a simple accounting mismatch. Companies already manage the travel half of travel and entertainment through dedicated systems, policies, suppliers, and reporting. Entertainment still moves through consumer discovery tools, fragmented venue communication, one-off contracts, corporate cards, accounts payable, and institutional memory.

Ande turns that sequence into software. An employee can discover and plan an experience while finance, legal, marketing, and management retain visibility into policy, approval, contract, payment, and reconciliation. The company is not trying to make relationships automatic. It is trying to keep the administration from interrupting them.

How Ande Connects Buyers and Providers

The enterprise side of Ande gives executive assistants, office managers, field marketers, go-to-market teams, and finance leaders a shared place to manage entertainment spend. The provider side gives restaurants and hospitality groups a direct corporate channel for qualifying inquiries, responding to availability, settling payments, and developing repeat business.

That two-sided design is the strategic center of the company. Better provider data can improve enterprise discovery and availability. More enterprise demand can give providers a reason to maintain accurate information and preferred corporate terms. If both sides keep participating, the network becomes more useful than a reservation interface or an expense tool operating alone.

Ande's entertainment-partner platform also shows the operational ambition. The company says its agent can capture and qualify inquiries, answer routine questions, support conversion, reconcile bookings, and help providers understand their corporate book of business. Human judgment remains important in negotiation, where one careless interaction can damage the relationship the event was meant to strengthen.

Leadership, Traction, and Customer Evidence

Ande's official team page identifies Lohit Sarma as CEO and Co-Founder, Michael McDermott as Co-Founder, Engineering, and Tal Yusov as Founding Product Lead. Redpoint Ventures says the core team worked together at Lifion and later recruited experience from companies including Navan, Uber Eats, Resy, and Restaurants365.

The company reports more than 60 enterprise customers, 93,000 entertainment providers across more than 90 cities, and more than $400M in annual spend flowing through the network. The $400M figure is spend throughput, not Ande revenue. Ande also says customers typically save 12% to 15% on spend managed through the platform.

Ande's customer stories make the operating claim more concrete. The company says Cloudflare used Ande to scale a partner-event format to 25 cities while saving 15% on event budgets. It says Navan consolidated 150 annual approvals into one vendor framework, while Netskope gained visibility across more than 300 annual events. These are company-published case studies rather than independently audited performance data, but they explain the workflow buyers are paying to simplify.

Funding and Market Position

Ande announced more than $52M across seed and Series A financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Duration Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures. The company did not disclose how much belonged to each round, its valuation, revenue, margins, retention, or fee economics.

The funding gives Ande room to expand the network and product after emerging from stealth, but capital is not the same as proof. The durable advantage must come from accurate provider data, enterprise controls that survive real procurement and legal review, repeat bookings, and enough service quality to keep relationship-sensitive transactions moving.

That makes Ande less comparable to a consumer restaurant app than to a vertical operating system sitting between procurement, hospitality, payments, and expense management. The market opportunity is credible because the work already exists. The execution risk is equally credible because the category combines software complexity with human service expectations.

Why Ande's Hiring Momentum Matters

Ande's official careers board listed eight openings on September 23, 2026, spanning a lead engineer, product design, product management, agentic AI, payments, hospitality account management, operations, and recruiting. Most roles were based in New York City, with a senior recruiter role listed as remote.

The mix is more informative than the count. Product and engineering roles suggest the company is still deepening the software layer. Payments and KYB work point to the compliance and money-movement obligations inside the network. Hospitality and account-management hiring reflects the provider relationships that software cannot conjure from a blank database.

Ande's stated values are customer obsession, caring meritocracy, and high performance without ego. The company describes a small team with direct ownership, visible impact, candid feedback, and limited management layering. Candidates can review the current Ande openings directly.

What Ande Signals for Enterprise Software

The broader signal is that enterprise AI is moving into categories where the hard problem is coordination rather than text generation. Corporate entertainment looks lightweight from the outside because the visible result is a dinner, suite, offsite, or gift. Underneath sits vendor data, availability, negotiation, approvals, contracts, payment, policy, and reconciliation.

Ande is betting that AI can carry more of that administrative load when it has a purpose-built network and clear human boundaries. Its financing story is covered separately in DevCuration's Ande funding analysis. The Company Spotlight question is broader: can Ande become reliable infrastructure for a category that enterprises value emotionally but manage inconsistently?

If the answer is yes, the company will have done more than automate event booking. It will have converted a collection of memorable moments into a manageable enterprise system without making the moments themselves feel managed.