Despite clouds of uncertainty that increase about the economy and geopolitics, people still want to travel. To meet that demand, MiaAn Amsterdam-Found ‘Unicorn’ Building A SaaS platform for Hotel Management has collected a new $ 75 million.
The financing comes to a crossroads in the travel industry. On the one hand there are positive signals. Analysts at Oxford Economics Predict that the industry will grow by 12% this year and ends up at 1.75 billion ‘arrivals’.
And budget for travel corresponds to money for startups for travel start. Travelperk collected $ 200 million in January with a rating of $ 2.7 billion; Hostaway raised $ 365 million in December 2024; And Tourlane in Germany raised $ 26 million from Sequoia in November 2024. Prosus also created the Latin -American travel player Despegar for $ 1.7 billion.
But it’s not all rosy. It is unclear how rates and other economic maneuvers will influence the travel budgets of people, not to mention the uncertainty about geopolitics. It is also remarkable that Expedia has been Take out staff -Do it be a one -off movement to improve efficiency, or is it a Bellwether to come from more?
Mews also has dozens of competitors, including established operators such as Oracle, as well as other startups such as Softbank-Stunder Cloudbeds.
For now, things seem to hum with Mews.
Tiger Global, a new backer, led this final round, with the participation of earlier investors Kinnevik, battery companies and growth -needed power at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. (Battery led Mews’ series B of $ 33 million, while Kinnevik and Goldman Sachs led the Series C of the startup $ 185 million C in 2022; Kinnevik also led his 2024 series D of $ 110 million.)
This last round is opportunistic, CEO Matt Welle told Techcrunch in an interview. In particular, it came after Tiger approached Mews to work more together. Mews does not reveal his current appreciation, and Welle called it a generic growth round instead, and added that the startup is planning to increase a much larger round in a year or two.
For some context: exactly a year ago, when Amsterdam-Found-Mews raised its series D, it was appreciated at $ 1.2 billion.
Mews has grown. Currently, around 6,300 hotels use its platform, an increase of 5,000 a year ago, and it said that in 2024 it processed $ 10 billion in payments, double from a year earlier. In 2024 the income crossed $ 200 million because it added more customers to the platform. It also expands the services on that platform, which also build more income per customer. Some are organic and some through mergers and acquisitions, such as the recent acquisition of Atomize to help its users with income management. Pitchbook Notes That MEWS also collected $ 100 million in debts in September last year to finance acquisitions.
Although a large part of Mews company is in Europe (it says it now has 20% market penetration in the Dach region, for example), much of the growth comes from a large push over the pond.
Nowadays, founder (and co-CEO) Richard Valtr spends most of his time in the US, where the company has focused a lot, the income in North America doubled in the past year.
When Valtr founded the company in 2012, he understood this many of the pain points of running a hotel company. He himself had been an independent hotel owner and he realized that there was an excellent opportunity to use the internet, and the rise of software-as-a-service, to build something new.
There are a number of point solutions on the catering market, but Mews uses a “toast” approach to the industry and builds his product with the concept of end-to-end. It offers software for managing the availability of hotel and booking online, directly and via third -party platforms; Tools for managing hotel staff and facilities; payment and accounting tools; Event management software; Loyalty and guest experience apps, and more.
Perhaps predictable, Welle said that Mews recently doubled AI. It has an internal team that does not work on various projects is not only customer-oriented agent tools, but also algorithms to improve how MEWS works. An example, he said, is a new customer profile option that takes on all activities and preferences of an individual as recorded in a hotel chain to create ‘tweet-sized’ compartments that caretaker and receptionists can use to improve customer service.
“Mews redefines what it means to offer exceptional guest experiences in the hospitality sector and beyond,” said Sara Eadie, who led the investment for Tiger Global, in a statement. (Tiger refused to be interviewed for this story.)
As it has grown, Mews has focused on catching larger fish in the hospitality room. The company says that the number of ‘brands’ from hospitality that are using its tools has doubled, and some of its new customers are best Western Hotels, Weekend and Lark Hotels.
To be clear, this does not mean that all best westerns now use Mews. As with all deals with customers who run a franchise model, Mews is now on an approved supplier list, but it still has to contract with individual franchises to win new things.