AI-Native Hotels: Mews’ USD 300M Round Powers Hospitality Transformation

• Hospitality platform Mews brought in USD 300M Series D from EQT Growth, Atomico, and other investors
• The funding supports AI integration across hotel operations, reducing staff workload and improving experiences
• Enhancing automation and analytics capabilities, Mews aims to set new hospitality standards with AI-driven, human-centric solutions

This January, Mews—the well-known Czech-founded hospitality tech unicorn—raised its Series D round of USD 300M. The lead investor of the round is EQT Growth, joined by the famous VC firm Atomico (invested in Dexory, among others) and HarbourVest Partners, alongside Mews’ long-standing supporters Kinnevik, Battery Ventures, and Tiger Global.

Founding Vision and Rapid Expansion

Mews is a cloud-based hospitality management platform founded in 2012 and headquartered in Amsterdam. The company was established by Richard Valtr and Matthijs Welle with the goal of modernizing hotel operations through fully cloud-native software.

Mews launched its first property management system in 2013, targeting independent hotels that wanted an alternative to legacy on-premise hotel software. Early traction came from European boutique and lifestyle hotel groups, helped by the platform’s API-first architecture and integrations with hundreds of hospitality tools.

The company began scaling rapidly after major funding rounds throughout the 2020s. Those investments helped Mews expand internationally and accelerate product development.

Strategic Acquisitions to Strengthen the Ecosystem

Mews also pursued growth through acquisitions, including companies such as Hotello and Cenium, strengthening its presence in North America and enterprise hotel segments. The company’s latest acquisitions include Flexkeeping, the hotel operations management platform, and DataChat, the leading generative AI analytics platform.

‘Our acquisitions strengthen our operating system and compound customer value. Culture fit is a critical part of such decisions. Cultural consistency comes from a clear mission, shared product principles, strong ownership, and integration focused on impact rather than just deal volume,’ Mews’ President Michael Coscetta comments.

Global Reach and Platform Capabilities

Today, Mews serves thousands of hospitality properties across more than 80 countries, including hotels, hostels, serviced apartments, and hybrid accommodations. Its platform covers property management, payments, guest experience, and operational automation, positioning the company among the leading modern alternatives to legacy hospitality systems.

‘Matt and Richard have built a category-defining platform with the depth, pace of innovation and global reach required by modern hospitality. The most ambitious builders in hospitality are focused on delivering ever-improving experiences for their end consumers, and they need technology that can keep pace with rising expectations around speed, service and personalization. Mews is the key enabler for the future of hospitality, and the team is well on their way to building a generational company,’ Atomico’s partner Laura Connell states.

EQT Growth’s partner Kirk Lepke shares that he had the pleasure of getting to know the Mews team several years ago and witnessed the company go from a bold vision to an organization delivering at scale. According to him, being one of the world’s largest industries, hospitality still has its core systems lagging decades behind, and Mews is creating a modern technology standard, an AI-enabled hospitality operating system that helps solve the fragmentation in the industry.

Accelerating AI-Driven Transformation of Hospitality

The new USD 300M investment is meant to expand Mews’ investments in AI, embedding agent-driven systems across the platform to automate complex workflows, reduce cognitive load for staff, significantly improve the guest experience and accelerate how products are built and deployed.

‘With EQT Growth joining in addition to new investors Atomico and HarbourVest, we have the backing to continue moving faster than anyone else in the industry. We are engineering an operating system that is changing how hoteliers interact with their guests. Mews exists to handle the operational complexity so hoteliers can focus on what matters: making hospitality even more fun, profitable, and fulfilling,’ Mr Welle states.

More specifically, this funding accelerates Mews’ multi-year transformation into the AI-native operating system for hospitality. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the company intends to expand AI across revenue, operations, and guest workflows, with copilots embedded directly into the tasks hotel teams already perform every day, such as rate recommendations, task routing, guest communication support, and operational summaries. Over the following 18 to 36 months, Mews expects to move toward more agent-driven orchestration across departments, where the system can coordinate actions across workflows with clear human oversight.

Assessing AI Success and Operational Impact

The success of such transformation can be measured through a combination of operational, adoption and commercial KPIs, including adoption rates of AI-assisted workflows, manual hours saved, time saved to train new staff, self-service completion rates across the guest journey (such as check-in and check-out), workflow resolution times, operational efficiency gains, and revenue or margin uplift for customers where applicable.

To ensure that rapid AI integration improves hotel workflows without introducing new operational complexity for staff, Mews adheres to the core principle that AI must remove work and make everyone’s jobs easier instead of creating more tools. With this in mind, the platform is embedding intelligence directly into the workflows hotel teams already use, with clear human oversight, guardrails, and the ability to override automated actions where needed. Because Mews is a unified platform across PMS, payments, housekeeping and revenue management, AI can orchestrate within one system instead of adding fragmented layers that increase switching costs and training burden.

‘We also sequence implementation carefully. We prioritize high-frequency, low-risk workflows first, then expand automation as reliability and customer confidence are proven. If a capability adds steps or complexity for staff, it is not the right implementation, and we are working with any of our customers to design these use cases,’ Mr Coscetta assures.

Privacy, Compliance, and Human Oversight

Seeing how hospitality is among the industries where trust is foundational, Mews builds its AI approach around privacy-first design, GDPR compliance, human-in-the-loop controls, and clear boundaries for automation.

‘We focus on operational insights in aggregate, not personal profiling, and we continue to invest in platform security and governance as hotels rely on Mews as their system of record. We want hospitality to remain human, so our goal is for AI to enhance human productivity, not to remove humans from the experience,’ Mr Coscetta specifies.

Risks, Operational Challenges, and Client Success

He names key risks that the company anticipates over the next 2-3 years, both technically and operationally, in realizing its AI-native vision. They include ensuring AI remains safe, reliable, and explainable in real-time hotel operations, and avoiding ‘bolt-on’ complexity that creates more work instead of less.

‘Another risk is uneven data quality and operational readiness at the hotel, which can affect how quickly automation delivers value. That is why rollout sequencing, integration discipline and customer enablement are just as important as model capability. Operationally, the challenge is adoption and change management across diverse markets and property types, while maintaining the right balance between automation and hospitality’s human touch,’ Mr Coscetta adds.

He is convinced that, alongside financials, client success is human. It can be measured by what Mews can observe directly through platform and workflow outcomes, such as reductions in administrative workload, faster onboarding times, improved workflow completion times, and higher levels of guest self-service adoption. The team combines those indicators with customer feedback signals, where available, to understand whether teams are experiencing lower cognitive load, better day-to-day usability and more time for guest-facing work. Essentially, the goal remains to help teams spend less time on screens and more time on hospitality.

Market Validation and Accessible Automation

‘Hospitality is the business of experiences. The validation for our product from the market is clear, in both the US and Europe, and it is great to see how we are now powering ahead of any other hospitality company in terms of AI and agentic hospitality. It’s an exciting time to reinforce our vision of making Mews hotels the most profitable in the industry,’ Mr Valtr summarizes.

Importantly, Mews specifically focuses on making its automation capabilities accessible through embedded copilots, pre-set workflows, simpler onboarding, and an open ecosystem that reduces IT burden not only for large hotel groups. For smaller operators in particular, this means specific practical adoption paths, easier setup, preconfigured workflows, and solutions that don’t require large in-house technical teams. The vision is that independents should run with the same intelligence and efficiency as the largest groups, without legacy complexity.

The USD 300M Series D round positions Mews to accelerate its transformation into a truly AI-native hospitality operating system, embedding intelligence across operations, revenue, and guest workflows. By combining global scale, advanced automation, and human-centric design, Mews aims to level up hotel operations making them more efficient, profitable, and seamless for both large groups and independent operators. The funding reinforces the company’s ambition to set a new standard for the future of hospitality, where technology enhances human creativity and guest experience rather than replacing it.