Amenitiz closes a 27 million round and will hire 200 people this year in Barcelona

Funding rounds for startups based in Barcelona continue to happen. The startup Amenitiz, which has developed a software platform for the independent hotel sector, has just raised 30 million dollars (27 million euros) to finance its expansion. The company's goal is to accelerate its growth plans in Europe, expand the range of products it offers to its clients, and multiply its workforce to accompany this phase of business acceleration.

Specifically, Amenitiz plans to recruit more than 200 talents for its Barcelona office, located in Plaza Urquinaona and where 150 people currently work. According to the company, the goal is to make these hires and raise the number of Amenitizers to 350 this year to scale the model, enter new European markets, and launch new applications for its software as a service (SaaS) platform for hotels.

This Series A funding round is, according to Amenitiz, the largest raised in Spain this year for a SaaS, and has been led by international VC funds Eight Roads and Chalfen Ventures, although existing investors who participated in the previous operation, such as Point-Nine, Backed, and Otium Capital, also participated in the operation. In fact, this injection of funds has closed just five months after announcing a seed capital round for 6.5 million last November, in which several business angels also participated, including Avi Meier, co-founder of Travelperk, and Matt Robinson and Carlos Gonzales, from GoCardless.

With an asset volume under management of 8 billion dollars, Eight Roads has a fifty-year track record in the venture capital sector and has been an investor in important companies such as Alibaba, Cazoo, Fever, Red Points, and Wallapop. Lucile Corner, partner at Eight Roads, will join the board of directors of Amenitiz, which was founded in 2018 by French entrepreneurs Alexandre and Emmanuelle Guinefolleau and Frédéric Cadet.

According to Corner, "Amenitiz has shown impressive growth despite the pandemic. This demonstrates that it is a ten times better, intuitive, and easy-to-use product that can achieve a perfect market-fit in a sector that has experienced little innovation in recent decades."

For its part, Chalfen Ventures is the firm through which British investor Mike Chalfen operates. He had been a senior executive at Apax Partners and Advent and successfully invested in companies such as King.com, creator of the video game Candy Crush. This is not the first time Chalfen has invested in Barcelona's entrepreneurial ecosystem, as he was a partner at eDreams between 2000 and 2005.

Amenitiz was considered one of Barcelona's ten most outstanding startups by Wired in 2021 and one of the ten Spanish startups with meteoric growth according to EU-Startups. The hospitech platform already has 4,000 hotel properties in 37 countries as clients and is growing rapidly, as the owners of these independent tourist establishments or those not part of a chain have realized the urgent need to digitize and update their software programs to counteract the dominance of online travel agencies (OTAs).

"As hoteliers wake up in a post-covid world, they find themselves even more dependent on their digital presence and online distribution to rebuild and grow their business," explains Alexandre Guinefolleau, CEO of Amenitiz. The entrepreneur assures that despite having already reached 4,000 clients, they are only just beginning, as there are 700,000 hotels, bed & breakfasts, and vacation rentals in Europe, 80% of which are independent properties with 50 rooms or less.

The key to the startup lies in having developed an operating system that simplifies hotel management to the maximum, freeing hoteliers from administrative tasks and providing them with an all-in-one tool that offers an optimized website and allows them to manage reservations and rates, boost direct sales ---reducing their dependence on OTAs---, issue invoices, and process payments. Another of its applications is a marketplace for its hotel clients to access new suppliers.