Amsterdam-based SaaS startup for the hotel booking industry Hotelchamp secured a 1.75 million euro seed investment from several informal investors. The money will be used to continue its growth.
Founded in 2015 by Kristian Valk (CEO) and Kasper Middelkoop, the startup offers a solution to hotel chains, and particularly the smaller ones. When someone books a hotel room via Booking.com, the hotels pay quite the fee. The software from Hotelchamp allows the hotels to get more direct bookings with sophisticated conversion techniques, thus skipping the middleman.
Forget the fee
Instead of a fee, clients pay Hotelchamp per month – the prize depending on the amount of hotel rooms. According to a press release, the turnover of the startup increases 77 percent per month. Right now the SaaS startup has offices in Amsterdam, Groningen and Berlin, and has grown to 25 employees to date. More than 500 hotels from over 20 countries use Hotelchamp. Recently Millennium Hotels signed up.
Hotelchamp investors
"We specifically went looking for a perfect team of investors, consisting of thoroughly experienced experts in fields such as hospitality, e-commerce, media and finance", Valk said. And they did.
Next to founding partner Investion Venture Capital, several experienced internet entrepreneurs invested. Among them are 'Nalden' (WeTransfer), Thomas Joosten, Marc Albert and three undisclosed entrepreneurs in the hotel industry. Co-founders Valk and Middelkoop also put in money themselves.
Image: by Gscarborough – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7767779