Amenitiz gets $30M for SaaS it bills as ‘Shopify for hotels’
Barcelona-based Amenitiz, which sells software-as-a-service for streamlining the administration of independent hotels and B&Bs which it shorthands as ‘Shopify for hotels’, has closed a $30 million Series A a few months after it announced a $7.5M seed.
The latest round is led by VC firm Eight Roads, with Chalfen Ventures and existing investors Point-Nine, Backed and Otium Capital also participating.
The 2018-founded SaaS maker isn’t disclosing its valuation for this raise but says it’s scaled its property management system (PMS) SaaS bundle to serving 4,000+ properties across 37 countries — up from 3,000 last November.
As well as enabling day-to-day ops, such as guest management, communication and invoicing — including Amenitiz’s own brand payment module — the fully integrated software platform includes a website builder and a channel manager, the letter designed to help independent hotels and guest houses to stay on top of multiple third party platforms where their property may be advertised (e.g. booking.com, Expedia etc).
It also connects customers to a marketplace of third party software tools to cater to additional requirements they may have.
The new funding will be used to expand into more European markets and launch more products on its platforms — along with further scaling the size of Amenitiz’s team, with a plan to grow from 150 people to around 350 by the end of this year.
Alexandre Guinefolleau, CEO of Amenitiz, told TechCrunch: “When we raised our seed round with Point-Nine, we did it with very specific goals in mind. We wanted to build our internationalisation playbook with the opening of Spain and Italy, launch AmenitizPay to simplify the way our hotels manage payments and start recruiting some strong leadership while also scaling the team (which we have done from 30 to 150 employees in 2021).
“With all those boxes ticked and seeing strong investor interest, we decided that now would be a good time to accelerate, raise another round and keep scaling in Europe.”
Amenitiz already has some customers for its SaaS outside the region but France was its first market of focus and it will continue to direct resource on expanding in Europe for now.
It notes that the region has some 700,000 hotels, bed & breakfast and vacation rentals, 80% of which are independent properties of 50 rooms or less — meaning they fall into the independent segment Amenitiz is targeting.
“France was our initial market (and the only one we focused on for the first three years). Since then, we have seen a fantastic response from Italy and Spain, which we launched in 2021 with similar acquisition metrics and initial growth,” says Guinefolleau. “The plan is to focus on Europe for now as it’s one of the largest tourism markets in the world but to quickly expand into new continents in the coming years (US & LatAm as a first expansion most likely).”
With the new funding, Guinefolleau says Amenitiz is targeting launching in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Germany and “potentially” Greece — which he notes that, along with its existing markets, represent 90% of the European tourism market.
On the product dev front, he says they’ll be adding more features that keep helping making hoteliers’ processes “faster and smoother”.
“Still, the most notable will be our Revenue Management System, allowing hoteliers to automate their pricing strategy based on their past occupancy and market data,” he adds.
Amenitiz’s SaaS essentially replaces the functionality of 3-4 different providers for target indie hoteliers — centralizing all that tooling on a single platform in order to streamline the admin burden.
“In Europe, most of our competitive market is made of very local, legacy providers, usually country or even, in some cases, region-specific,” says Guinefolleau. “In France, it would be the likes of Eviivo, Vega (PMS), MisterB
“Globally our biggest competitor would be Cloudbeds which is US and LatAm focused but offers a similar suite of products.”
Commenting on the Series A raise in a statement, Lucile Cornet, partner at Eight Roads and also now an Amenitiz board member, said: “Amenitiz has shown impressive momentum despite the pandemic. This shows how a 10x better product, which is intuitive and easy to use, can quickly achieve product-market fit in a sector that has seen very little innovation in the past few decades. We’re excited to work together with Alex, Emma and Fred.”
