Despite clouds of uncertainty looming over the economy and geopolitics, people still want to travel. To meet that demand, Mews, an Amsterdam-founded ‘unicorn’ building an SaaS platform for hotel management, has raised a fresh $75 million.
The funding is coming at a crossroad in the travel industry. On one hand are positive signals. Analysts at Oxford Economics forecast that the industry will grow by 12% this year, working out to 1.75 billion “arrivals.”
And budget for travel equates to money for travel startups. TravelPerk in January raised $200 million at a $2.7 billion valuation; Hostaway raised $365 million in December 2024; and Tourlane in Germany raised $26 million from Sequoia in November 2024. Prosus also scooped up Latin American travel player Despegar for $1.7 billion.
But it’s not all rosy. It’s unclear how tariffs and other economic manoeuvres will impact people’s travel budgets, not to mention the uncertainty over geopolitics. It’s also notable that Expedia has been laying off staff — could it be a one-off move to improve efficiency, or is it a bellwether of more to come?
Mews also has dozens of competitors, which include incumbents like Oracle as well as other startups like Softbank-backed Cloudbeds.
For now, things appear to be humming along for Mews.
Tiger Global, a new backer, led this latest round, with participation from previous investors Kinnevik, Battery Ventures and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. (Battery led Mews’ $33 million Series B, while Kinnevik and Goldman Sachs led the startup’s $185 million Series C in 2022; Kinnevik also led its 2024 Series D of $110 million.)
This latest round is opportunistic, CEO Matt Welle told TechCrunch in an interview. Specifically, it came after Tiger approached Mews seeking to work together more. Mews is not disclosing its current valuation, and Welle instead called it a generic growth round, adding that the startup plans to raise a much larger round in a year or two.
For some context: exactly a year ago, when Amsterdam-founded Mews raised its Series D, it was valued at $1.2 billion.
Mews has been growing. Currently, some 6,300 hotels use its platform, up from 5,000 a year ago, and it said that in 2024 it processed $10 billion worth of payments, double from a year before. In 2024, its revenue crossed $200 million as it added more customers to the platform. It’s also expanding the services on that platform, which is also building more revenue per customer. Some are organic and some by M&A, such as its recent acquisition of Atomize to help its users with revenue management. Pitchbook notes that Mews also raised $100 million in debt in September last year to fund acquisitions.
While a large part of Mews’ business is in Europe (it says it now has 20% market penetration in the DACH region, for example), a lot of the growth has come from a big push across the pond.
These days, founder (and co-CEO) Richard Valtr spends most of his time in the U.S., where the company has been focusing a lot — it doubled revenues in North America in the last year.
When Valtr founded the company in 2012, he did so understanding many of the pain points of running a hotel business. He had been an independent hotel owner himself, and he realized that there was a prime opportunity to leverage the internet, and the rise of software-as-a-service, to build something new.
There are a number of point solutions in the hospitality market, but Mews takes a “Toast” approach to the industry, building its product with the concept of being end-to-end. It offers software for managing hotel availability and booking online, directly and through third-party platforms; tools for managing hotel personnel and facilities; payment and accounting tools; event management software; loyalty and guest experience apps, and more.
Perhaps predictably, Welle said that Mews has recently been doubling down on AI. It has an in-house team working on different projects — not only customer-facing agentic tools, but also algorithms to improve how Mews works. One example, he said, is a new customer profile option that takes in all of an individuals’ activities and preferences as logged at a hotel chain to create “Tweet-sized” summaries that concierges and receptionists can use to improve customer service.
“Mews is redefining what it means to deliver exceptional guest experiences in the hospitality sector and beyond,” Sara Eadie, who led the investment for Tiger Global, said in a statement. (Tiger declined to be interviewed for this story.)
As it has grown, Mews has focused on catching bigger fish in the hospitality space. The company says the number of hospitality “brands” that use its tools has doubled, and some of its new customers include Best Western Hotels, Weekender and Lark Hotels.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean all Best Westerns are using Mews now. As with all deals with customers that run a franchising model, Mews is now on an approved supplier list, but it still needs to contract with individual franchises to win new business.
