Amenitiz, a Barcelona startup that has developed a product, touted to be ‘Shopify for hotels’, has closed $30 million in Series A funding round. This round follows the $7.5 million seed funding round it raised back in November last year.
The latest financing round was led by VC firm Eight Roads which invested in Tibber and Spendesk alongside Chalfen Ventures and participation from existing investors Point-Nine, Backed and Otium Capital.
How will Amenitiz use the funding?
Amenitiz will deploy the new investment to expand into more European markets, focusing on launching in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Germany and Greece. Alongside the existing markets, this represents 90% of the European tourism market.
The company wants to launch more products on its platforms as well. These new products and features are aimed at making hoteliers’ processes faster and smoother. Furthermore, it plans to scale the size of its team, increasing it from 150 to 350 by the end of this year.
Alexandre Guinefolleau, CEO of Amenitiz said, “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.”
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.”
Redefines the future of online hospitality
Founded in 2018 by Alexandre Guinefolleau, Emmanuelle Guinefolleau and Frederic Cadet, Amenitiz touts its products to be the operating system for independent hoteliers, B&Bs and cottages. It offers a digital toolkit enabling hoteliers to easily update websites and revamp unintuitive booking engines.
Also, the company is building a software-as-a-service product that combines everything one needs to run a hotel. It lets owners grow and manage their vacation properties by luring guests, managing bookings and crafting exceptional experiences, simple and easy. Amenitiz redefines the future of online hospitality together.
It offers a property management system, acts as a channel manager and it lets accept direct bookings more easily.
To date, Amenitiz has helped over 3,000 properties in 28 different countries.
What does Amenitiz do?
Usually, hotels rely on channel managers to avoid cumbersome micro-management work. A channel manager can manage the listings across dozens of booking sites at once. These bookings are synchronised to show accurate availability of rooms across platforms. To handle this, a property management system becomes imperative.
Instead of relying on legacy technology, Amenitiz wants to create a proper software-as-a-service alternative that works well. As an added benefit, users can build cool stuff on top of this foundation.
Amenitiz’s SaaS replaces the functionality of multiple providers for target hoteliers and centralises all the tooling on a single platform to streamline the property management.
The startup helps property owners create a website for their hotel or B&B. On this site, users can book rooms directly using the startup’s booking module. If guests want to book a room with a phone call or a WhatsApp message, owners or managers can send a payment link and track the booking in Amenitiz.
