He is only the third person from the Czech Republic to have achieved this. Founder Richard Valtro’s startup Mews, which develops hotel and lodging software, has closed its next investment round, valuing it at more than a billion US dollars. In doing so, he met the condition to become a so-called unicorn, as startups with a billion-dollar value are referred to. He joins Rohlík and Productboard in the stable of mythical animals with a horn on their head and at the same time with a Czech passport.
According to information from CzechCrunch, which was also confirmed by Mews’ official communication, the startup has now closed another investment, expanding the so-called Series C by another 110 million dollars, equivalent to 2.6 billion crowns. He originally announced the round in December 2022, when investors sent him 185 million dollars (4.2 billion crowns). At that time, it was the fourth highest amount that went to a startup of Czech founders.
The Mews’ valuation at the time was within striking distance of the magic billion dollars when it settled at 865 million. However, its valuation has currently grown to 1.2 billion dollars (28 billion crowns). The current investment round is led by Kinnevik, together with other existing investors Revaia, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Notion Capital, with LGVP becoming the new investor. The startup, which CzechCrunch included in the CC25 selection, i.e. companies worth watching, has already received a total of 335 million dollars from investors, which is 7.8 billion crowns.
Mews provides accommodation establishments with a system for managing reservations, check-ins and handling the requests of their guests. He can deal with the complete management of the hotel, including the staff. During the last year alone, 100 million dollars (2.3 billion crowns) flowed through Mews in the form of annual net income. However, the company does not comment on whether it is in profit for a long time. An important part of the platform is the Mews Payments payment system, which is the biggest source of income for the startup, the volume of mediated payments now exceeds eight billion dollars (187 billion crowns).
Mews director Matthijs Welle and founder Richard Valtr
The ambitions that Mews will one day become a billion-dollar unicorn have been talked regarding since at least 2019. It was then that it raised its first large financial round in the amount of over 750 million crowns. But a year later, the startup received a big blow. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, which halted global tourism and affected many hotels and guesthouses, he had to react quickly and laid off 40 percent of the approximately 400 employees at the time.
But following the internal transformation, Mews returned to growth, breaking its records and in 2020 also started to acquire other companies. Since then, it has already announced a total of eight acquisitions, most recently in January of this year, which it is doing under the banner of its own investment fund. According to the latest available information, today the startup employs over 900 people and its platform is used by over five thousand accommodation facilities in more than eighty countries. It thus serves 350,000 hospitality premises.
Mews was founded in Prague in 2012 by Richard Valtr, who studied philosophy at the prestigious University College London and originally built his career in art and cinematography. When he was regarding to move to the United States to pursue his dream, he received an offer from his father to help him with the family business in Prague, and he began building the luxurious five-star hotel Emblem. And it was there that he realized the potential of digitizing the hotel industry.
In Prague, Mews operates its office with the highest number of employees. It has other offices in London, Bruges, New York and also in Amsterdam, where it also moved its official headquarters years ago. This is not a purely Czech startup, but in CzechCrunch we refer to all startups that were founded by Czechs in this way. And in the stable of mythical unicorns there are two such besides Mews.
The first was the online supermarket Rohlik.cz of the founder Tomáš Čupr, which surpassed the billion valuation in the summer of 2021 and whose value is expected to be at the level of 1.2 billion dollars. Another addition in February 2022 was Productboard of founders Hubert Palán and Daniel Hejl, valued at $1.725 billion.
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