When Matthew Knipfer joined Aalo Atomics to handle operations, his mission was clear: "Take care of all the things that Aalo's PhDs shouldn't be spending their time on." Booking travel topped that list.

Employees traveled constantly, visiting data center clients, supply chain partners, regulatory bodies, and their own laboratories. Since this was an essential part of the job, travel spend increased rapidly—but Matthew didn’t have any spend controls or visibility. 

Matthew turned to AmexGBT, trusting the American Express brand name, only to discover that it was even more complicated than manual booking. “The platform’s user interface was so bad that finding the best flight to Chicago required six separate searches,” said Matthew. “And worse, their prices were consistently higher than Google flights—sometimes by hundreds of percentage points. And this just meant employees were incentivized to book with their personal cards to get more points.” 

Despite using a dedicated travel platform, Aalo was still feeling operational inefficiency, paying more per flight, and had most employees booking with personal cards. This all caused a major lack of visibility and control into travel spend across the company.

Aalo joined Rippling's Travel beta, looking for a solution that would give them better visibility and automated control in travel spend. Matthew immediately saw it was "directly solving all our problems with AmexGBT,” and the transformation touched every aspect of their travel program.

Rippling’s easy-to-use interface resulted in skyrocketed adoption at Aalo. “"With AmexGBT, we had like 5% of employees using the platform. It was that bad. But with Rippling, we're at 85% and trending toward 100% adoption." As a result, nearly all of Aalo’s travel spend now runs through one platform that offers complete visibility and control.

Rippling Travel offers the convenience of  Google Flights, with your company’s spend policy embedded in the design. Employees see clear in- or out-of-policy flags on every booking, and you get the same inventory at the best prices. Plus, it integrates frequent flyer accounts so employees earn personal miles when booking. "Rippling disarmed all the rebuttals I was getting for travel platform adoption," Matthew explained.

Rippling disarmed all the rebuttals I was getting for travel platform adoption.

Matthew Knipfer

Operations at Aalo Atomics

With adoption trending quickly toward 100%, for the first time, Matthew gained total visibility into travel spend. He tracked critical reports like top spend by traveler, department, and office. He even tracked the average booking lead time to see how far in advance employees were booking their trips, and encouraged teams to book further in advance to save money, except in truly urgent situations. This allowed Aalo to catch expensive habits before they became systemic problems. 

Matthew also leveraged Rippling’s policy engine to create spend policy based on department, role, office location, and more. And Rippling’s smart corporate cards automatically enforced these policies by blocking any out-of-policy spend in real-time. With increased visibility, employees knew they had to follow company policies more closely.

With Rippling Spend, Aalo’s expense approvals automatically route to the right approver based on organizational structure, eliminating the email chains and last-minute approvals that previously consumed executive time. "Now we're not wasting our executives’ time, because Rippling's smart enough to do all of these approvals automatically,” Matthew noted.

The integration between Rippling Travel and Rippling Payroll proved particularly powerful. "If an employee uses their personal card, we can perform a reimbursement in concert with Rippling Payroll that is auto-approved because it's within our Spend policy," Matthew explained. "Every time we use a tool like this where we don't have to hire a whole department, it's great.” 

This automation freed Aalo's leadership team to focus on mission-critical work, like product development and their latest fundraising, round rather than administrative tasks.

 Now we're not wasting our executives’ time because Rippling's smart enough to do all of these approvals automatically.

Matthew Knipfer

Operations at Aalo Atomics

• 6x faster bookings: Side-by-side comparison showed AmexGBT took six times longer than Rippling for the same flight search.
• 85% adoption and growing: From three users on AmexGBT to 85% of employees actively using Rippling Travel, which is trending toward 100% adoption. 
• Executive time reclaimed: C-suite leaders now focus on fundraising and product development instead of manual approvals.
• Proactive spend control: Complete visibility allows Matthew to identify and eliminate wasteful spending patterns before they become expensive problems.