WeRoad, the Milan-based group travel startup, has raised a $58 million Series C round led by Airbnb as it prepares for its first major expansion outside Europe.
Developer platform GitLab has laid off about 14% of its workforce, about 350 employees, as part of a broader restructuring effort it detailed last month.
The company said in May that it was going to reduce its workforce as it exited 22 countries, flattened management layers, and invested in infrastructure to scale its platform and serve increased traffic from AI workflows, with a sharper focus on research and development.
CEO Bill Staples said during a conference call on Tuesday that agentic workloads are stressing developer infrastructure more than it was designed to handle. It isn’t a problem unique to GitLab. The company’s rival GitHub has itself struggled to deal with a massive influx of AI-powered submissions that have affected its uptime.
“Agents work at machine scale, and they’re pushing competitors to the brink. This quarter we began a generational rebuild of git to support the scale and features required for 100x growth. This is a scale requirement that didn’t exist before and has become a real pain point for every team on their agentic journey,” Staples said.
Staples said the company has partnered with an unspecified AI lab to design and rebuild its infrastructure for AI workloads, as well as construct APIs “optimized for agents to store and retrieve context, including code.” It is also investing in orchestration tools for coordinating software development between AI agents and developers, building a context layer, and baking in governance tools directly into its platform.
GitLab joins a number of tech companies such as Intuit, Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle that have laid off large numbers of employees, citing a need to make AI a core part of their business. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues.
The pattern is by now familiar: companies are reporting record revenues while simultaneously shrinking their workforces, with AI cited as both the reason for the growth and the justification for the cuts.
Indeed, all of these companies have recently reported strong revenue and profit, pointing to strong demand for AI products, services, or the infrastructure to power them, and GitLab is no exception.
On Tuesday, the company reported first-quarter revenue of $264 million, up 23% from a year earlier, and gross margins of 88%. It expects to incur $30 million to $35 million in restructuring expenses as part of the effort. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Ram is a financial and tech reporter and editor. He covered North American and European M&A, equity, regulatory news and debt markets at Reuters and Acuris Global, and has also written about travel, tourism, entertainment and books.
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WeRoad, the Milan-based group travel startup, has raised a $58 million Series C round led by Airbnb as it prepares for its first major expansion outside Europe. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to roughly $100 million and will finance WeRoad’s push into the U.S., beginning with Austin.
The new investment reflects a bet that the next generation of travel companies may look less like booking platforms and more like social platforms designed to facilitate real-world connections.
The U.S. launch also arrives as loneliness, particularly among younger consumers, has become both a public health concern and an emerging business opportunity. When much of the tech industry remains focused on AI, WeRoad is positioning itself as part of the growing “IRL economy,” a category of startups monetizing offline interaction rather than screen time. Companies like Timeleft, 222, and Pie are pursuing similar ideas through dinners, clubs, events, and community-based experiences.
The idea behind WeRoad came from the founders—Paolo De Nadai, Fabio Bin, and Erika De Santi— seeking connection themselves.
“It started from a very personal need. When you finish college and start working, it becomes harder to find people to travel with. Friends were settling down, having kids, moving away, or simply couldn’t align schedules anymore,” De Nadai told TechCrunch. “My cofounder Fabio and I both tried companies offering similar group travel experiences for solo travellers, but while the trips were good, something was missing. The guides were professional local experts, and the groups were mixed in age, and people didn’t really see eye to eye. People were traveling together, but not really connecting.”
Image Credits:WeRoad
The founders’ response was to redesign group travel around shared interests. WeRoad trips are primarily designed for younger travelers and grouped around shared interests and travel styles. Customers can book trips through the platform based on themes such as beach vacations or skiing.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What if we created trips for Millennials and Gen Z travellers, bringing together people from the same age groups with shared cultural references but completely different backgrounds, and focused on creating real bonds between them?’” De Nadai added.
Before each trip begins, travelers are added to a WhatsApp group managed by the group leader so members can begin getting to know one another ahead of time. Groups typically include between eight and fifteen travelers.
“The biggest concern people have is rarely the destination,” De Nadai said, but usually concerns that they won’t connect with the group. To address that, WeRoad intentionally structures itineraries around social dynamics. More adventurous or collaborative activities are often scheduled early in the trip to help break the ice.
Most itineraries last between 10 and 12 days, though the company has also introduced shorter weekend formats aimed at first-time customers. According to WeRoad, roughly 60% of travelers eventually book another trip.
Additionally, instead of traditional tour guides, WeRoad has “group leaders,” coordinators closer in age to travelers who act more like travel companions. The company now works with more than 4,000 group leaders globally.
“We’re not looking for destination experts, but for people with travel experience and strong soft skills. Can they lead a group, handle tension, adapt when plans change, and help strangers connect?” De Nadai said.
Image Credits:Screenshot from App Store
WeRoad has also begun expanding beyond travel itself. In 2025, the company launched WeMeet, an app focused on local in-person gatherings, including dinners, hikes, yoga classes, running groups, after-work drinks, and board game nights. WeRoad says more than 50,000 people attended WeMeet events across 35 cities last year, while the app reached 150,000 downloads.
The company says WeMeet will also play a central role in its U.S. expansion strategy. R
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